Nordic Football News

Veikkausliiga has offered a little more information about how it will share revenue from the new TV deal. the sums involved are pretty small, but the distribution formula has been clearly tweaked in the light of recent debates in Finnish football. Clubs will be allocated points based on various criteria, and the more points you get, the more money you receive.

There are the usual, expected fees for league placing, but then there is also extra cash for clubs who play their home games at grounds with conditions ideal for TV coverage.  The carrot of extra money, even if it is a little at first, will likely work a lot better than the threat of a failed licence application, which the league has attempted to use before.

Then there is the Finnish implementation of the ‘Austrian pot’, which has begun to distribute a portion the Austrian Bundesliga’s TV revenues only to teams that use a minimum of eight Austrian players in each round. The Finnish version offers cash to teams that have 6 Finnish players or 2 players eligible for the Finnish under-21 team in the starting line-up.

In Austria this has worked against the wealthier clubs (“Red Bull Salzburg get nothing from the Austrian pot each round,” says Stefan Kraft, editor of Austrian football magazine Ballesterer and not a fan of the nouveau riche energy drink advert masquearding as a football club), but in Finland the issue has been brought into sharpest focus by last season’s bottom club RoPS, who frequently fielded teams featuring a majority of foreigners.

This season the team most likely to suffer looks to be IFK Mariehamn, who have 10 foreign players under contract for 2010, partly due to their role as a link between Finland and Sweden (and from there to the rest of Europe). At present the money is not enough to make a big difference, but in time it might be and the experiment is an interesting way around the legal difficulties faced by FIFA’s 6+5 proposal.