Antonin Kinsky joined Tottenham in January 2025 and seemingly has established himself as first choice goalkeeper under Roberto De Zerbi.
Kinsky‘s time at Spurs has not been without its challenges – a very difficult night in the Champions League the obvious one.
However, coming into the team under De Zerbi towards the end of the 2025-26 season, Kinsky proved a massive part of Tottenham’s battle for survival.
Now, fans are starting to see they may have pulled off a transfer masterstroke as they begin to witness why he was so highly thought of back home in Czechia.
Antonin Kinsky’s Tottenham story so far
Having proven hugely impressive as Slavia Prague’s number one, Tottenham paid £12.5 million to sign Kinsky in January 2025.
According to reports, Johan Lange was a driving force behind the deal, having identified the shot-stopper from his data algorithms. This paved the way for an extensive scouting operation.
Guglielmo Vicario’s ankle injury saw Tottenham speed up the signing, having initially planned it as a summer move. Kinsky made his debut in the EFL Cup semi-final, keeping a clean sheet in a 1-0 win over Liverpool.
Into the 2025-26 season, Kinsky made his first appearance versus Doncaster Rovers in the EFL Cup, keeping a clean sheet in a 3-0 win. His next appearance, versus Newcastle in the same competition, was a 2-0 defeat where he was blamed for the second goal.
It was the Champions League trip to Atletico Madrid, though, that was highly controversial.
Spurs went down 5-2, with Kinsky making errors for two goals early on.
With Tottenham trailing 3-0 after 17 minutes, Kinsky was substituted by Igor Tudor. Tudor did not even acknowledge the young keeper as he came off, earning widespread criticism.
If anything, it looked like the incident could spell the end of Kinsky’s Tottenham career.
However, an injury to Vicario in March opened the door to a first-team return.
With Roberto De Zerbi now at the helm, Kinsky played all remaining games that season. This included making a stunning stoppage time save in a 1-1 draw versus Leeds.
He also made another excellent stop and kept a clean sheet as Tottenham secured survival versus Everton on the final day.
This late season form led to Kinsky earning an improved contract which he signed in June.
Kinsky’s life before Tottenham
Kinsky is a Czech goalkeeper, born in Prague, who shot to the limelight in the first half of the 2023-24 season in light of his performances in the Czech top-flight and the Europa League.
Very much from the breed of modern-day goalkeepers, who are confident with the ball at his feet, the youngster has a reputation for being able to be extremely composed under pressure and find the right passes.
Quite fascinatingly, he shares the exact same name as his father, a fellow Czech goalkeeper, who hung up his boots back in 2010, having represented his country five times and spending the majority of his club career in Russia.
Having been born in Prague, Kinsky joined the academy of Tempo Prague aged just six, and would also go on to spend a few years in the youth set-up of Bohemians 1905 and Dukla Prague.
Then in 2021, he joined the academia of Slavia Prague, the biggest club in the country and immediately made waves in youth football.
His talent was clear from a young age, having represented Czechia all the way from Under-15s right up to the Under-21s, without missing a single age group side in between.
The goalkeeper got an opportunity to prove himself in men’s football when he joined Czech second-division side Vyskov on loan for the 2022-23 season, where he had an outstanding spell.
He was then loaned out to Czech top-flight side Pardubice last season, and he was once again up to the challenge, displaying maturity beyond his years.
His parent club had seen enough to be convinced and ahead of the 2024-25 season, he was made Slavia’s number one, a role that comes with a lot of scrutiny and pressure.
However, Kinsky was once again completely unfazed by the jump, delivering impressive reflex saves and showing the sort of authority and composure on the ball that rivalled the best goalkeepers in the world.
Klinsky’s impressive numbers
Not only is Kinsky extremely young for a goalkeeper, but he is putting up numbers that rival the best numbers across Europe. He conceded just seven goals in 19 league games for Slavia, keeping 12 clean Sheets in the process.
The 23-year-old was at number one across the top ten leagues in Europe in terms of save percentage, goals conceded and clean sheets for the first part of the 2024-25 season.
The numbers suggest that the Tottenham man is also one of the best when it comes to passing out from the back, having a better pass-completion rate than any other goalkeeper in the Europa League this season.
Antonin Kinsky’s goalkeeping strengths and weaknesses
The one thing that is obvious from the above stats is that Kinsky is excellent when it comes to shot-stopping and also finding the right passes from the back.
However, stats alone often do not tell the full picture, which is why it is quite instructive to listen to what his former goalkeeping coach, Rostislav Horacek, has to say about the youngster.
Horacek, who worked with Antonin Kinsky during his loan spell at Vyskov, told Flash Score about the new Tottenham man last year: “His style of play is such that he’s straight away preventing himself from coming under pressure.
“He plays in such a way that it makes sense and the opponent doesn’t immediately go on the break. This makes his job easier for himself, but most of all it helps the whole team.
“He doesn’t care which foot he uses to kick the ball. I asked him in training which one he prefers, but he said it doesn’t matter. In short, he kicks with both equally.
“In Slavia, he has a great defence in front of him. It’s difficult for him to go 40 minutes without a save and then has to solve a difficult situation quickly. That’s exactly what Petr Cech used to do at Chelsea.
“Many times he can do something that would make his job much easier, but he prefers to choose a riskier solution because he wants to solve the situation in a football way at any cost.”
However, in the same interview, Horacek pointed out that the goalkeeper’s tendency to lose concentration when he is not involved for a long time is his biggest weakness.
The 57-year-old added about the former Slavia man: “He has a problem in one thing. Sometimes he doesn’t get into a match where he has a blind spot for 30 minutes, for example, he doesn’t get the ball at all. It bothers him because he loves to play, to play. He needs it.
“And when the ball gets to him, he sometimes tends to slip into wanting to be seen and invent unnecessarily complicated things. I can imagine that against Ajax, for example, the coaches had to restrain him so that he wouldn’t go crazy with some risky pass, because it could smell of trouble.”
Antonin Kinsky’s personal details
Antonin Kinsky was born on March 13, 2003, in Prague and stands at a height of 1.90 m (6 ft 3 in) and weighs in at 83 kgs.
His height puts him exactly on the average height of goalkeepers across the Premier League and just short of fellow Tottenham keeper, Guglielmo Vicario, who stands at 1.94 m (6 ft 4 in)
Kinsky currently has over 230k followers on Instagram.