FC Haka

EDIT-see my FC Haka Correction regarding the first few paragraphs.

The previous post was a bit premature, it must be said. Haka still have an appeal, and most people expect them to get their licence, but the whole affair does raise some questions. For instance, why has their budget been passed for Veikkausliiga competition but is apparently not fit for UEFA? Veikkausliiga chairman Jan Walden was asked by Aamulehti whether they’d been playing with a special licence under conditions, and what would happen to that licence now, and his reply was less than confidence-boosting.

“No they haven’t….no comment…I have to go now, bye bye,” said Walden.

Given that the league did indulge in a fair amount of cockswinging towards TamU, Honka and RoPS in the last round of licensing, it would be a bit rum for them to have simply passed Haka ‘with conditions’ without the public naming and shaming given to the others. I would even go so far as to say that it would defeat the entire object of licensing systems (to promote financial responsibility among clubs). But that is speculation, and we’ll see what happens next week.

To be fair, not many people want to say anything worthwhile on the subject. I asked Haka CEO Seppo Laitinen what he thought about it, and he said he “cannot speak about that in English. Maybe next week,” giving the impression that he expects some movement in the appeal, or possibly that his employer will go bankrupt by then. Other Haka sources have pointed fingers at Göran Enckelman (Peter’s Dad) and Markus Juhola, two guys with TPS connections and varying degrees of beef with Haka who served on the UEFA licensing committee. I wouldn’t put too much store by that, but it does show how personal everything is in Finnish football.

The reaction on messageboards and in the media has surprised me a little. There have been stories that the club is on the verge of bankruptcy (denied by Laitinen, in Finnish), but the expectation is that UPM will bail out the club. Haka’s take on this is that the licensing committee has misunderstood the relationship between the newly created holding company, FC Haka Oy, and FC Haka. According to Helsingin Sanomat, Laitinen claims that “the UEFA team licence decision that we have received is clearly based on claims and statements that FC Haka can easily rectify”, so you’d expect this all to be a storm in a teacup.

This is Finland, however, and clubs with multiple title wins go bankrupt very easily indeed. FC Jazz, FinnPa, HIFK and Allianssi are all clubs that have done well in the top flight and subsequently gone bust. So journalists have been reminiscing about the previous bankruptcies, like the time when FC Jazz players were given macaroni casserole instead of a post match meal.

In that article, Sundqvist also expects that UPM will plug the gap, but at some point the forestry sector will surely stop propping up their football teams in Finland. The Finnish paper industry is declining as a proportion of UPM’s business, and my questions to football-interested UPM employees were redirected to ‘the local department’ - Finland is seen as an accounting hub as much as a pulp producer these days, and the big factories, and plans for expansion, are abroad. It will be interesting to see if UPM have the budget or inclination to help out what must surely have been one of their best marketing tools, down the years.

That’s what Haka are, really: a marketing tool. A step up from a factory works side, but they have represented UPM in a European Cup Quarter final against Juventus, when by all accounts (you can take it as read that I haven’t spoken to Michel Platini or his team-mates on this one, and that ex-Haka players exaggerate after a beer or two) they were unlucky to go out. The paper mill is in the corner of the ground, the stadium is called ‘factory pitch’, the sponsors are all aimed at the management of the company and most of the fans work directly or indirectly for the paper mill.

The VIP bus I saw on Monday night was run by Rauman Stevedoring, a west coast shipping company that wants to impress and get the contracts to distribute paper products all over the world, and around the ground hoardings include those from Tilbury docks, Finnlines, VR Cargo and other freight companies. So we can say that in the Finnish mindset they are inextricably linked with the paper industry, just like MyPa.

This has some odd effects. Finnish economic policy has, on occasion, been run to suit the paper industry. Devaluations were implemented in part to ensure that paper products remained competitive on the world market, despite the pain this caused people who had to buy things from abroad. The imperative to keep production running meant that forest industry unions were among the strongest in Finland, always opting out of the economy-wide wage settlements and getting themselves a much better deal. This caused a slightly British ‘tut tut’ attitude towards those unions and that industry, and there is some shadenfreude mixed in now that a small town club run by the paper barons is getting it’s comeuppance.

I don’t share this at all. I think Haka are a great club, that they have a brilliant ground, and that there is a place for that kind of community club in Veikkausliiga. They need to concentrate on producing youngsters, ‘owning’ their town and making a profit on player trading, something like what Jaro aim to do, but they should be able to hold things together. Veikkausliiga is not a big money league, and there are lots of towns of a similar size to Valkeakoski that have competed in much more prestigious leagues than this. The question is whether Haka (and probably MyPa too, not that there are indications of problems there) can handle the transition from being aristocrats of the Finnish game competing in ‘Finland’s classico’ (Haka vs HJK) to being a tightly run club counting the pennies and hoping for success. I hope they haven’t overstretched themselves.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• FC Haka correction
• Sounds of Valkeakoski