On A Snowy December Evening
10 December 2019
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They have always said that Finland is no place for football and will never be as good as Sweden, Norway or Denmark, even Iceland at this point. Whoever these experts are have no clue what they are saying. In three years of my journey into football management I have seen the sport become more popular than ever before. Obviously hockey still dominates the country but football is growing. I don’t know if it is because of the massive amount of immigrant’s here these days or kids are starting to consider the sport good enough for a career.
It was a colder than usual December evening in Tampere as the city was getting ready for Christmas a few weeks later. Many were out in the streets enjoying each person’s company, shopping or finishing the work day up. One person out of the thousands out there was a guy by the name of Ilmari Hartikanen. Ilmari who is 6’3 is easily recognizable in this part of town. All these years later he is still recognized for his time playing hockey for the local club Tappara. Usually Ilmari will slow down and take time out of his day to talk, but not today he was in a rush to get to a very important meeting.
Getting to where Ilmari needed to go was not hard at all even as the snow was getting heavier by the minute. Once he arrived to his destination he gets a text message from his girlfriend Amanda;
“Good luck babe, you will do awesome!!!!”. As he was about to respond to her text a man who is about as tall as Ilmari speaks up and says,
“Are you Ilmari Hartikanen????” This startles him and he drops his phone.
“Oh yes I am Ilmari!!” The man apologizes and picks up the phone for Ilmari. Are you ready said the man?
The two start to move toward the building and as soon as they get in the man introduces himself as Ville Salonen, the club’s chairman. Ville leads the way through a narrow corridor that is decorated in many different Christmas decorations and after about 30 seconds the two approach a room. Now this is the chairman’s office, you would think it would be a nice fancy office but it wasn’t. It was your basic office room with tons of papers and other materials that would be appropriate for a chairman of a football club.
Once settled into the office Ville invited Ilmari to sit down and the interview begins..........................