Nordic Football News

The biggest story of the Sixth Round was Tampere United’s decision to play their home tie against Jaro at Tammela Stadium, a ground considered by many to be Finland’s best. The significance of this is not obvious to those who have not been closely following Tampere football in recent years, so I will recap briefly.

The first thing to make clear is that Finland has a dearth of football grounds. Most clubs play in athletics stadia or on pitches with poor facilities for spectators, and it’s widely assumed that it would take a lot of money to correct this.

Tampere United played at Tammela Stadium for the first five years after inception in 1998. When they got big crowds they moved matches to Ratina, a 16,800 capacity athletics and concert venue behind the bus station. This arrangement worked very well as the club developed, with crowds of 2-3,000 watching domestic matches at Tammela and enjoying the experience.

Tammela is unique in Finland. The capacity is suitable for Veikkausliiga football, at around 5,000, it is easily reachable from all parts of the city because of its central location, it has a roof on every stand, keeping fans dry when it rains, and virtually every seat is within 20 metres of the pitch. The tight ground makes spectators feel part of the game, and when they sing they can create a special atmosphere unmatched anywhere else in Finland.

The ground’s urban setting is another massive plus, as the floodlights give the place a glowing, warm feeling as you turn corners past apartment blocks and tall, red-brick buildings in one of the busiest districts in Tampere. There are excellent pubs, cafes and restaurants within a minute’s walk from the ground, and the stadium is now well-integrated with its surroundings.

Readers with experience of British football will not find anything special about this, as Tammela is just like many British lower division grounds, but context is everything: there is nowhere in Finland that is as good as Tammela for watching football.

Given all this, it’s surprising that the club decided to move to Ratina. Reasons given at the time included the small capacity and poor VIP facilities (sponsor and VIP revenue constitutes around 80% of most Finnish clubs revenue, with only around 15-20% coming from gate receipts), and the impossibility of renovating Tammela because of protections in place on the stadium and it’s surroundings. When I asked the Finnish National Board of Antiquities (NBA, Museovirasto in Finnish) about Tammela, they denied that any restrictions or protections concerning Tammela had ever existed.

“Tammela Stadium and Koulukatu Ice stadium are not protected by law, town plan or (in) any other way at the moment,” Tampere museum’s Minnu Mäkelä emailed in response to my query. Tammela has never been protected in any way by the NBA, and its development will not be hindered by them.

The plans for developing Tampere United seem to have run away from the reality of Finnish football in the last few years. While championships have come, European campaigns have helped, and the club has racked up trophies, crowds have stubbornly failed to match the ambitions of the board. When moving back to Tammela has come up, Tammela’s low capacity has hindered the possibility of a return, with one plan suggesting that a 7,000 seater stadium was a minimum, even though TamU very rarely need 7,000 seats to accommodate their crowds.

The problem is simple: in the Finnish spring and autumn, when it’s dark and raining, Ratina is an utterly miserable place to be unless it is at least half full. A 3,000 crowd feels special at Tammela, but can make you suicidal at Ratina. So the club is in a catch-22 situation, with crowds unwilling to come and the existing fans disenchanted by the matchday experience because crowds are so small.

The VIP facilities are good at Ratina, but the financial crisis has ensured that sponsors are a little bit reluctant to cough up right now, and so the club is currently entertaining the idea of moving back to Tammela to try and increase gate revenue.

With the forthcoming European Women’s Championships, Ratina will be out of service for three weeks at the end of August and beginning of September, and so TamU have little option for the next round of the cup. The Jaro game was a dry run for a potential permanent move, and it generated a good deal of excitement for a competition that is, at this stage, pretty devalued.

The club promoted the Jaro match by offering free entry to everyone who joined their facebook fan page, and the crowd crowd was 1,480 – a very good figure for a rainy evening fixture against unattractive opposition in a usually-ignored competition. As I walked up the steps before the second half, someone shouted out to say hello – it was a guy who rarely goes to TamU games, but came along because the match was at Tammela.

“It’s so warm as well, because there are so many people packed together!”

This kind of enthusiasm is difficult to achieve by marketing and adverts. People like Tammela, they like TamU, they like football. If TamU move there permanently, it might just be the best decision they ever make.

TamU won 2-0 and were always in control, with Kangaskolkka breaking his scoring drought and celebrating like a nutter with the fans – something that’s impossible at Ratina. Sheweleff, playing with a slight injury, added a second and was less visibly happy (but no doubt smiling inside), and the game kind of petered out until TamU’s kit man was sent off for kicking the ball away, prompting an amusing outburst in his direction from Ari Hjelm.

A brilliant video story of the game comes from Tampere’s dedicated football video producer Petteri Tyni, and the photo gallery is from the ever-excellent Petteri Lehtonen. In the video the sequence involving the padlock on the toilet came about apparently because TPV fans (an Ykkönen club that usually plays at Tammela) had re-padlocked them after the caretaker had opened them before the match. Result: massive queues for half-time urination and presumably some beavis and Butthead-style guffawing among the TPV fans.

It was quite funny, I suppose, and after the game the pub consensus was that TamU would like to draw TPV in the next round. I’d prefer a club with fans that actually sing, but whoever TamU get, virtually everyone agrees that the main thing is that they play at home, and almost everybody nowknows where ‘home’ is for TamU.

[View with PicLens]

12►

Other results:

FC Espoo – HJK                   0-1  (0-0)
50′ Mäkelä 0-1

FC Futura – VPS                 1-4  (0-2)
15′ Hahto 0-1
25′ Kainu 0-2
61′ oma 0-3
64′ Ahmad 1-3
81′ Lindroos 1-4

Gnistan – JBK                     5-0  (2-0)
19′ Hokkanen 1-0
21′ Hokkanen 2-0
47′ Anttila 3-0
53′ Anttila 4-0
72′ Martikainen 5-0

FC Inter – RoPS                  2-0  (1-0)
18′ Ramirez 1-0
86′ Purje 2-0

MYPA – KuPS                      1-3  (1-1)
31′ Ricketts 1-0 rp.
37′ Balogh 1-1
64′ Venäläinen 1-2
81′ Koljonen 1-3

PoPa – PK-35                      3-1  (3-0)
6′ De Mattia 1-0
20′ Melarti 2-0
40′ Melarti 3-0
79′ Jurvainen 3-1

Real Kokkola – Pallohonka   2-6  (0-4)
13′ Sid 0-1
27′ Perera 0-2
34′ Valdrin Seferi 0-3
40′ Valdrin Seferi 0-4
55′ Ilomäki 0-5
77′ Huuhka 1-5
81′ Sid 1-6
85′ Pensaari 2-6

TPV – JIPPO                       3-1  (2-1)
36′ Kemmo 1-0
40′ Kemmo 2-0
45′ Rönkkö 2-1
63′ Eränen 3-1

Pöxyt – TPS           0-2 (0-1)
Hoxha  33
Mäkelä 90

AC Vantaa – JJK        2-3 (0-2)
Karvinen 49 rp Lahtinen 17 71
Paila    57    Markkula 39

FC KooTeePee – FC Honka   0-2 (0-1)
Puustinen 12
Kokko     52

City Stars – Pirkkala JK   3-1 (0-0)
Kauppinen  50 Similä 80
Lähdesmäki 59
Kauppinen  87

Tampere U – FF Jaro    2-0 (2-0)
Kangaskolkka 19
Scheweleff   42

Spartak – FC Haka       0-5 (0-1)
Bäckman    37
Holopainen 62
Denissen   65
Innanen    70
Strandvall 88 rp

GBK – FC Jazz-j         0-1 (0-1)
39′ Salminen

Viikingit v FC Lahti will be played in August, unless Lahti progress even further in the Europa League. They went through against Dinamo Tirana yesterday, 4-3 on aggregate.