What you soon realise when you speak to people about the late Cheick Tiote is that everyone has a story.
“We were playing together for Newcastle at Manchester City,” Demba Ba recalls about the gladiatorial midfielder who was one of the Premier League’s most combative players before his untimely death, five years ago on 5 June 2017.
“We were about halfway through the first half and Yaya Toure ran past me, stopped and looked at me and said: ‘Demba, speak with Cheick!’ Yaya is a beast himself but Cheick was giving him a really hard time on the field that day.
“Yaya said: ‘We’re playing the African Cup in a couple of weeks together, trying to win the trophy together and he’s trying to kill me!’ I thought ‘Yeah, that’s Cheick’. He was energy and you couldn’t do anything about it.”
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“He used to say to me ‘We train how we play’. He was such a fun guy but as soon as he got on the pitch, he was different. I was his best friend but he’d kick me,” Papiss Cisse says.
“People would say to him ‘Papiss is your brother’. He’d say ‘A brother at home, but we are training now’.
“No-one wanted to challenge him except one player – Danny Gosling. I remember Tiote would send him every moment to see the doctor. We used to say to him ‘Take it down a notch’ but he couldn’t.
“He would kick him and Dan would come back two days later, trying to get stronger. But he brought that energy, he made everyone train with that intensity.”
Tales of his generosity abound, of packing suitcases full of match-worn boots and shirts to send to a charity project in Nigeria run by his friend Yusuf Abubakar or turning up at a Newcastle staff member’s house with the gift of a widescreen TV so big it barely fit in the front room.
One friend recalled that Tiote had offered to pay for his wedding. He would send hundreds of thousands of pounds a season back to his family and friends in Ivory Coast and at the time of his death was building a Mosque and setting up businesses to support the community he grew up in.
“It is what we must do,” he used to tell people.
Other tales are more poignant. “I remember coming back on a plane from Southampton and it was particularly bumpy,” recalls Newcastle’s former Head of Media Wendy Taylor.
“I hate planes so I’m getting frantic, Moussa Sissoko was sat the other side of the aisle screeching, wondering what the hell was going on. Papiss Cisse hates flying too and I knew Cheick didn’t like it. But he was sat in front of me, looking so calm and he turned around and laughed.
“’Wendy, you’re not ready to go to heaven yet, that’s why you’re panicking. I don’t like flying but I’m ready to go to heaven’.
“He just had this inner certainty that everything would be OK on the other side, a devout faith. Genuinely he thought he knew that when he died things would be even better than where he was then.”
Tiote’s story is one of an incredible rise from the most humble of beginnings, of the problems that drag down players from his background and of a sport that should do more to support them.
One of the oldest of 10 children, he played with bare feet as a child on dusty pitches in the Ivorian capital of Abdijan. Spotted by Anderlecht, he arrived in Belgium on a minimum wage before being transferred to Twente in Holland. “I felt a bit used by Anderlecht,” he admitted in a rare interview from his time in Holland.
That naivety followed him to Newcastle, where the club’s hierarchy couldn’t believe the terms of the first £30,000-per-week contract he signed in 2010. When they bumped his wage up to £45,000 to match the club’s highest earners months later, they told him to make sure he was taking a bigger cut of the wage.
He was painfully shy at first, barely able to utter a word in English. But his ferocity in training convinced his teammates that here was a force to be reckoned with.
Newcastle’s “gladiator”, reckons Cisse. Ba says he would deliberately pass the ball rather than take him on.
“When I arrived I had heard and seen a little bit of him and he always seemed as if he was teetering on the edge of ill discipline,” his former manager Alan Pardew recalls.
“I realised he was such a bumbly, funny guy – he always had a smile on his face.
“I couldn’t put the two together at first – I couldn’t correlate how he played and how he was in general life. But as soon as you saw him train, you realised he was a different animal.
“I got on with him straight away. I realised that his energy was going to be very important to the way I wanted the team to play.”
He was universally adored at Newcastle and respected by his peers. He felt “at home” at St James’ Park. His influence over his teammates was huge.
“Sometimes I felt like I was down and out and he would rescue me,” Cisse says. “I am still playing at 37 in Turkey in the Super Lig and that’s because of how Cheick showed me. Any success I’ve had in football, I owe 50 per cent of it to Tiote.”
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“All he wanted to do was help – with charity, his friends, his teammates. He was always there, coming to help,” Abubakar said.
“He stayed so humble. You see celebrities and think they’re one way but you realise they’re totally different.”
On the pitch, he was establishing himself as one of the best defensive midfielders in the country. A faultless performance in a 3-0 win over Manchester United in 2012, dominating a midfield including Michael Carrick and Ryan Giggs, confirmed his rising stock.
“It’s probably (the 4-4 result) against Arsenal people remember him the most because of the comeback and his special, special goal,” Pardew says.
“I don’t remember too many of my players from the first half but Joey Barton and Cheick Tiote changed the game in the second half. It was absolute one way traffic and I think the love that the lads all had for Cheick just spilled over in that celebration after the fourth goal.
“I would always encourage him not to shoot because he was awful and the other players would do the same. If he got anywhere near the box we’d want him to pass it but it came out to him and he smashed it.
“It was a great moment for him and sort of elevated his profile to what he should have been. We weren’t in the top eight but he was putting in top six performances every week. He could have strolled into the top five teams no problem.”
He ‘never once’ asked about interest in himself or agitated for a move away, Pardew says. Friends say he loved how he could ‘be himself’ in the North East. He would sometimes turn up for training in traditional Ivorian dress with no-one batting an eyelid.
But the naivety that remained was beginning to catch up with him. One colleague couldn’t believe he was paying for cars to be crated in England and shipped over to Ivory Coast. Reports of a second marriage hit the tabloids. He was banned from driving.
“People would always say stuff for the clicks. I felt the media did not really help. In his position I would have had a mental breakdown, some of the s__t he put up with,” Abubakar says.
“Everyone had that thing about Cheick, it didn’t matter what mood you were in, if you were around him, you would be positive.
“He had that charisma about him, even at a sad time. Even when the media was crushing him back in Newcastle he would say ‘It’s just life. People will always have opinions’. He would tell us not to worry about it, as long as you are clear between yourself and God, it’s fine.”
Eventually, though, things did begin to unravel. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders at the end of his time at Newcastle,” a former Newcastle staff member said. A complicated family life and money worries were impacting performances.
“He’d got to that level of wealth where people were just take, take, take and he was such a kind soul he’d just give it to them. And he was just stressing out.”
Salvation arrived in the form of an offer from China, from Beijing Enterprises, where the money would be nearly double his Newcastle salary.
Cisse is up front about the move to China, which he made at the same time. “He had a business plan – the reason we go to China was not for football, it was for money. It was to save my life, for our family. Me and Cheick knew why we went to China.
“He knew my project, I knew his. When it happened I said in my mind: We were a long way from our family but we were doing it for a reason.
“Cheick went there for his family. To do something for his family and people around him. It was the same target for me when I was there. In Africa, this is what we do. If you make some money in your life, you save your family and people around you to give them a better life, a job. You set up a company so you can give a salary for people to lift up their life. Every African player does this – it’s not just me and Tiote.
“He sacrificed all this for his family.”
On the morning of June 5, Tiote was walking onto the training pitch with his phone in his hand. Prophetically he messaged Abubakar that ‘This world is vanity, the best world is heaven’ before joining his new teammates.
A few minutes later he collapsed without a player next to him, and never got up. There was no post-mortem. Friends believe it was a sudden, unexpected and unexplained cardiac arrest.
“Whenever I see anything like what happened to Christian Eriksen, I always think of Cheick,” Pardew says.
“You can do all the tests as a club, you can never guarantee over the course of the way we play, the intensity you play at, that something like that isn’t going to happen.
“Unfortunately it happened in that situation where they couldn’t bring him back.”
He was just 30 and the shockwaves reverberated around the football. Cisse had spent the previous day with him, catching up over food. He was on his way to training but his driver had to pull over to deliver the news.
“I lost my mind. I did not sleep for a week. My friends were saying to me: ‘Papi, you’re going to get sick’,” he said.
“They were looking at me, getting scared. I was sat in my front room, just looking at my phone waiting for the WhatsApp or We Chat telling me ‘Cheick is fine’ or the message from him. For a long time, I did not cry.
“I went to the hospital to see his body after one week. They let me do that. Then I cried, for a week I cried. Back at my club, I sat on my own, I was crying all the time. This loss was painful. For me, I lost my brother.”
His wife, who owned a sewing shop back in Abidjan, was nine months pregnant at the time.
“I knew the plan, what he wanted to make for his family. I knew why he was in China. I knew everything. The kids were so young,” Cisse says.
“In the end, what’s going on now his wife is doing an amazing job for the kids. She is amazing but this loss was so painful for me.”
Tiote’s widow spoke bravely last year in a TV interview of the depression she fell into after his passing. When the abrupt 5am phone calls he used to make urging her to pray every day stopped, she said she felt “bereft”.
Just last week, Cisse spoke to Tiote’s son, now 12. He is an aspiring footballer and wanted to know about aspects of the game.
“He has three children with (first wife) Madah. She is amazing. I spoke to her one week ago and she is doing such a good job.
“Baby Cheick is trying to be a footballer like his daddy and it makes me very, very sad. I cannot show it over the phone but he’s asking me about football. I need to be strong to give him advice and to tell him who his Dad was.”
His wife found the money to finish the Mosque he started building. But his young family have only photos and YouTube to remember his remarkable career, which burned brightly and extinguished as quickly.
“If they invite his family to Newcastle United, it would be the best moment of my life,” Cisse says.
“Those kids are growing up but if they could see what their Dad did for the club, how much the fans loved him, the energy he had for that club. That would be an unbelievable day for me and for his family.”
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