Football | HJK's promotion brought Ossi Virra to the top – the special quality of the 35-year-old coach was noticed a long time ago

Helsinki The football club's incomprehensible head coach mix-up finally got a certain kind of point on Friday. The Spaniard originally named head coach Ferran Sibila – who lacks the Uefa pro qualification required for a head coach – was transferred to be responsible for “developing the game process” and was named the chief commander Ossi Virta.

According to the original plan, Virra was supposed to work in Sibila's team as an assistant coach. He transferred to HJK in the middle of last season from Valkeakoski Haka, where he had worked Teemu Tainion as the right hand from the beginning of the 2022 season.

Virta has received an extraordinary amount of attention in both Haka and HJK considering his status as an assistant coach.

In Haka, he became a viral hit on the scale of the Veikkausliiga in the summer of 2022 with his fast somersaults and other spectacular and amusing stunts. In HJK's European games last fall, he delighted social media with his fast-paced and analytical outpourings in Viaplay's intermission interviews.

So it is known that Ossi Virra lives with emotion in games and can deliver concise and comprehensive tactical analyses. Not much is known about him, if the most passionate big spenders of domestic football are left out of the bills.

What kind of man is this guy who rose from being a social phenomenon to the head coach of Finland's biggest club?

Power, 35, grew up as a player at Käpylä Pallo and also started his coaching career at the same club. He started as a junior coach in 2005 when he was only 17 years old, although his playing career continued at the same time until well into his twenties.

Relative to his young age, Virtra's resume as a coach already has a decent number of entries.

After ten years at KäPan, he advanced to become the director of SJK's Academy in 2015. From Seinäjoki, Virta moved to Kotka, where he quickly got to test the sharpness of his nails for the first and so far the only time as a head coach at the two top men's league levels.

The seam of the stream already opened in the first Kotkan season in 2016 in the men's First Division. When Sami Ristilä got his starting passes in mid-summer, the second coach Virta was promoted to his place. Even at that stage, the responsibility was too much, because KTP played a weak final season under Virtra and was relegated to Kakkonese.

In the following season, Virta did not continue as head coach, but remained in the KTP organization in various positions until 2021.

2021 Virta moved to the head coach of his breeding club KäPa in Kakkone. He spent a year there, until he was invited to Haka's league team as Tainio's second man. In autumn 2022, together with Tainio, he also started the Uefa pro course required of Veikkausliiga head coaches.

How about where do these almost performance-artistic and verbal outbursts that conquered social media come from? The easiest explanation is that of passion.

“Even though I'm analytical, I'm also passionate. I have a burning desire to do this job and I throw myself fully into what I do”, Virta described her coach persona For the morning paper in autumn 2022.

This view is also supported by the speeches of people who have dealt with Virra. Already in the early days of his coaching career, Virtra's special skill was quick and thorough analysis of the game without sports jargon or kapu law.

“I feel that I am a coach who can interact, I talk a lot and listen a lot. I am open, honest, direct and very demanding. The important thing is to train people. This is interpersonal work, everything starts from that,” he told AL.

When talking about Virtra, the passion that shines through everything that is done is often repeated. The extraordinary half-time interviews may seem like some kind of performance, but his classmate from the low C-level of coaching training says that a similar quick analysis in plain language was heard from Virra's mouth even then.

Virta lives with emotion and does not hide it.

Ferran Sibila (center) was supposed to become HJK's head coach this season, but it turned out differently. Picture: Heikki Saukkomaa / Newspaper photo

Place The position as HJK's head coach opened up for Virra by chance and due to the club's quite a bit of confusion, but it is a huge screen position for the young coach.

According to the current licensing rules of the Veikkausliiga, the person named as the head coach cannot be a mere marionette who sways in the background according to the whims of the “real head coach” who is leading the operation.

According to the current license regulations, the person announced as the head coach must be responsible for the representative team's player selections, tactics and training, guiding the players and other background personnel in the dressing room and technical area before, during and after the match, as well as obligations towards the media.

As long as HJK complies with these regulations, Virta will get a real opportunity to show his talent at the highest level in the country and in the country's second most important football coaching competition.

At least it seems certain that in front of the media, accurate game analysis is heard many times, which does not require follow-up questions.