Soccer coach Toni Koskela knew he was going to catch a windy wash when he left for Cyprus. His coaching contract lasted three months.
When Toni Koskela, 40, accepted the offer of head coach of Cypriot premier league club AEL Limassol, he knew that the job could also be short-lived. In Koskela’s case, the contract lasted three months.
AEL Limassol reported today on their website, that the entire coaching team has been allowed to leave. According to the club, the contracts were terminated by mutual consent.
– There is a lot of politics in these countries and winning is emphatically the only thing that matters, Koskela communicated from Cyprus.
– In the end, we didn’t win enough compared to the club’s expectations – no matter how realistic the expectations were given the club’s current situation.
Koskela said that many clubs change coaches more than once a season. However, he saw that he has more to gain than to lose in his mission.
– All in all, good, it would have been a hard entry on the CV in extremely challenging conditions. On the other hand, when things go “normally”, everyone still knows the difficulty of the environment. Even these three months contained a book’s worth of events and experiences, good and bad.
Paychecks dropped
AEL Limassol is a six-time champion of the Cyprus league, but in recent years there has been no success. The most recent championship is from the 2011–12 season, and last year the team finished ninth. When Koskela took over the team, it was tenth in the standings. Under the Finnish coach, the team raised its ranking by a notch.
In Koskela’s opinion, the team performed at the expected level, considering what happened on the field and, above all, off the field.
– We beat the lower ones, but we couldn’t stretch against the top 6 teams.
According to Koskela, he worked in the club with his coaching team Teemu Tainion, Mikko Lignelli and Marco Spano with at a time when the greatest difficulties began to be revealed.
– The coach has to think about his process quite differently when there are players (and coaches) in the team whose salary is falling behind as badly as has happened here, he said.
A better coach today
Before Limassol, Koskela coached HJK since May 2019. Under his leadership, the club won the championships in 2020–22 and advanced to the group stages of the Conference League in 2021 and the European League in 2022. HJK released Koskela from his position in July.
Koskela has had a clear goal of getting to coach abroad, but now that this season is over, he currently has no bigger plans than that.
– The next couple of weeks we will certainly enjoy a warm winter and see what spring brings. I believe that these experiences will also be useful in the future. I am definitely a better coach today than when I started here in October.