The Finnish Football Federation dropped the curtain in Helsinki on Monday, which the Danish and German football media had already poked holes in during the past week.
As the new head coach of the A national team, the Huuhkajie, a Dane walked into the media room of the Olympic Stadium Jacob Friis48.
He will do his last services as a second coach to his current employer, the Bundesliga club Augsburg, in Saturday’s home match against Heidenheim and will start his work in the Finnish Football League after that.
Important points
With six away points in Berlin and Bremen within a week, Augsburg already took a ten-point gap to the dangerously close relegation line. Friis said that he enjoyed his last week in Germany very much and that he will leave his job and the team in a good mood.
Even though Augsburg had offered an extension to the contract, which expires in the summer, Friis was immediately interested when Palloliitto was the sports director Aki Hyryläinen got in touch.
– I wanted to take on the big responsibility of implementing ideas about football with my team.
The Dane was very careful not to mention names, either for players or for possible assistant coaches, and admitted that the decision was conscious.
After all, the laundry itself won’t start until next Sunday.
Friis appeared with a low profile and politeness, all arrogance shining through his absence.
17 names, 10 countries
Sports Director Hyryläinen said that Friis was initially screened from a list of 17 names, which included coaches from 10 countries, also from outside Europe.
Creative links to Frisia would have been e.g. this Augsburg player Fredrik Jensen or the fact that Augsburg’s Danish head coach Jess Thorup is for Huuhkajie’s assistant coach Tim Sparville very familiar as the former head coach of FC Midtjylland.
Hyryläinen commented that the recruitment was, however, based entirely on Palloliitto’s own information acquisition, not on the mentioned connections.
Reached by Urheilu, Sparv stated on Monday that he is willing to continue working also in the Huuhkajie coaching team led by Jacob Friis. Personally, he doesn’t know Friis yet.
Friis was a big unknown to the Finnish public when the Danish newspaper Tipsbladet reported on his contract with Finland on January 12. To Danes, he was clearly more familiar, e.g. As a former, successful head coach of Aalborg and Viborg in the Superliga, but not quite a top name in his field.
On the other hand, it was precisely people of this profile that the Football Association was after. The price tag of name trainers is generally too high for that.
A family tragedy changed Frisia
A man who threw himself into a coaching career shortly after his 25th birthday can be found in the CV a special gap from 2020 and 2021. His daughter got sick with leukemia, and the father of a family of three took a sabbatical from work.
– He is still receiving treatments, but he is doing well, Friis said.
He knows well from his own past that if a top-level sports professional tells you that sport is not the most important thing in life, he is almost always not telling the truth.
– I don’t have to lie anymore. My daughter’s illness changed me as a person, and it changed my values. The long checkout line at the supermarket is no longer annoying.
Friis tells an example from 2020, when he did an interview with a familiar Danish journalist.
– When he asked me, and the pressure tolerance required by a coach’s work does not go to unreasonable measures, I was able to answer quite spontaneously that I no longer feel pressure from the results.
Life as a stake
At the time of the interview, the situation of the daughter, who was in the hospital, was at its most critical, and the stakes were of a different class than ever on the green side.
Friis said the whole family was excited about his father’s Suomipesti. The family settles in Aalborg in Jutland, from where Friis travels to the tasks required by his job. He plans to watch a lot of Finnish matches both abroad and in Finland, where Palloliitto hosts him.
As a curiosity, let me tell you that the late uncle of Friis 2017 Henning Jensen was one of Denmark’s great players and a superstar by Allan Simonsen a teammate in the 1970s big club Borussia Mönchengladbach.
The wife and mother of 6, 8 and 11-year-old children is also a former player.
Before the World Cup qualifiers that start in March, the new head coach has a whole three training sessions to tune up the team before the Malta match.
– That’s the everyday life of national team coaching. But I managed to do something even in that time. If I didn’t have time, Ari could just as well have taken the team into his coaching, Friis stated and pointed to the chairman of the association standing next to him Ari from Lahteawho was in the decision-making role of the recruitment process.
The contract, which fits well within the financial framework of the Friesland Football Association, ends when the European Championship qualifiers for the 2028 Games are over in 2027. If Finland is in the Games, the contract will continue beyond the final tournament.
Another Dane
Jacob Friis is the second Danish head coach in the history of Finland’s A national team. Already deceased Richard Möller-Nielsen served as head coach 1996–99.
Friis was presented at the Olympic Stadium, where on October 11, 1997, Finland was seconds away from qualifying for the World Cup in France 1998, until Hungary equalized in extra time.
The memory is the bitterest in Finnish football history.
– I know that story. Unfortunately, I never got to meet Richard.
Möller-Nielsen was a heavyweight recruit in his time, as his Denmark had won European Championship gold in 1992.
– We watched the matches on a family vacation in Turkey, and after Denmark won the championship, I saw it for the only time in my life when my father was drunk, Friis recalled.