Nordic Football News

The Finnish newspapers have been full of talk about Veikkausliiga’s apparent ‘crisis’ in the last few weeks. Domestic football in Finland has long suffered from poor facilities, low attendances, players leaving for richer foreign leagues, but these problems have become more prominent recently, and the football media has not been slow to point out the difficulties.

It’s not hard to poke fun when the average league attendance is almost 1,000 below the target figure announced before the season, but to do so is to ignore the underlying reasons for football’s apparent crisis.

Firstly, the schedule has been unforgiving. Finnish clubs playing two matches a week during the ice hockey world championships – about which Finns go wilder than a virtanen offer at the local bar – are going to find it difficult to attract punters, and the quality of their pitches and stadia make that task even harder in many cases.

Many football clubs are not well run, and so it would pay for them to search out best practice and try to emulate it. Unfortunately, that is not the Finnish football tradition, and so clubs like JJK – who have a respectable average of 3,225 despite being tipped for relegation at the start of the season – are not studied enough by their contemporaries.

Under CEO Joni Vesalainen the Jyväskylä outfit have brought thousands through the turnstiles despite a fairly ramshackle ground and a team that is unlikely to finish in the top half of Veikkausliiga this season. Their strategy has revolved around marketing their season tickets aggressively, selling over 1,000; targeted free tickets, with 5,000 going to schoolchildren in Central Finland; and creating the kind of ‘buzz’ that makes sponsors want to fund a sporting entity.

Around 80% of JJK’s income comes from sponsorship, with the remaining 20% coming from matchday revenues, mainly ticket sales. That proportion is comparable to most Finnish clubs, but JJK have some innovative ways of increasing revenue. They have used their new Korean signings to extract more cash from a local sauna company with expansion plans in Asia. After striker Ik Kyung Nam scored the equaliser against HJK last week, few will question the footballing worth of the signings in football terms, either.

There are problems, even for well run clubs like JJK. Compared to a hockey club with 30-35 home games a season, a Veikkausliiga side has just 13 with which to raise cash, and Vesalainen would like to increase the number of matches. Such a move is difficult with 14 clubs demanding equal treatment but moving slowly to implement facilities that would lengthen the Finnish season.

That will remain a pipe dream for the foreseeable future, as Finnish clubs find it hard enough to get their pitches into playable condition for the April opening we had this year, never mind an earlier start. But JJK’s forward-looking, internationalist outlook should be a model for Finnish clubs as they look for ways to fill holes in their sponsorship budgets as the recession deepens.