Khoren Oganesian

Khoren Oganesian (Խորեն Հովհաննիսյան; born 10 January 1955), also known as Khoren Hovhannisyan, is a former Armenian and Soviet football player who played as a midfielder and currently a football manager and coach.

Khoren Oganesian was born on 10 January 1955 in Yerevan, Armenian SSR in a family of sportsmen.

His father was a weightlifter, and later an honored coach of the Armenian SSR.

His mother specialized in gymnastics.

Khoren's older brother played football and his younger brother became a weightlifter and later received the Master of Sport of the USSR title.

Oganesian grew up playing football in a nearby yard with his older brother.

In 1969, he joined the team of Ani Yerevan and won the All-Union neighborhood teams tournament Leather Ball and scored one of the goals in the final meeting.

Oganesian later engaged in a sports school, after which he entered the Armenian State University of Economics, specializing in state planning.

At that time, he was invited to try out for the youth football teams in Armenia, where he was noticed by the head coach of the Soviet Union national under-21 football team, Yevgeny Lyadin.

Lyadin wrote a letter of recommendation to the leadership of the local club Ararat Yerevan, where Oganesian was taken into in 1973.

He played as a second for two years.

His debut match in Ararat took place on 19 March 1975 in the quarterfinals of the 1974–75 European Cup against Bayern Munich.

The match ended in a 1–0 victory for Ararat Yerevan.

He debuted in the Soviet Top League national championship a month later on 16 April in Yerevan.

In a match of Ararat Yerevan vs. Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, Oganesian came in at the 75th minute of the match, replacing Sergei Bondarenko.

The match ended in 3–0 victory.

Oganesian was scoring a lot from the first matches of the Top League.

He had the ability to hit accurately with his left leg, was a skilled organizer, and had precise percussive attacks.

Ararat Yerevan won the Soviet Cup in 1975.

At the end of 1975, Oganesian was in the national list of award winners as the best newcomer of the Top League season, chosen and awarded by the All-Union Soviet sport magazine Smena.

He was awarded the Master of Sport of the USSR, International Class title in 1976.

Oganesian was a member of the USSR national football team and mostly played at club level for Soviet Top League and Armenian Premier League club Ararat Yerevan.

He is widely considered a legend of Ararat and Armenian football in general.

In official games of the USSR championships, Oganesian had 295 matches and scored 93 goals for Ararat.

His number of scored goals is a record of the USSR in Armenian football.

In the following year, the club made it to the finals of the 1976 Soviet Top League in the spring, where Ararat Yerevan lost to Dynamo Moscow.

Oganesian became the captain of Ararat Yerevan in the early 1980s.

He scored with his heel in a match against CSKA Moscow in 1983 in Moscow and scored, the ball flying through the goal net, in a match against Neftchi in 1981, in Yerevan.

In February 1984, Oganesian scored his one hundredth goal, which made him a member of the Grigory Fedotov club.

In 1985, due to disagreements with the management of Ararat, he left the club.

Oganesian almost didn't play for almost two years because he was unofficially disqualified for alleged match-fixing, though that was never proven.

In 1987, he agreed to play for the factory team Arabkir Yerevan, which became a champion of the republic.

In 1988, it appeared already in the Soviet First League.

He took part in the farewell match of Oleg Blokhin, the all-time Soviet top goalscorer, in 1989.

In December 1989, he received an offer from the head coach of Pakhtakor Tashkent, Fyodor Novikov.

He helped the Uzbek football club get to the big leagues.

In November 2003, to celebrate UEFA's Jubilee, he was selected as the Golden Player of Armenia by the Football Federation of Armenia as the nation's most outstanding player of the past 50 years.

In a survey taken in 2005 by the Football Federation of Armenia, Oganesian was chosen as the best player of Armenia in the 20th century.

On 28 May 2010, on the occasion of the Armenian Republic Day, a number of prominent figures of different areas were honored.

For his contribution to the Fatherland Order of the President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, the law on State Awards, the highest award of the country, were given to Oganesian, who was awarded the Khorenatsi medal.