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This week All Points North hears about the challenges, the risks and the rewards of developing minority sports in Finland.
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Rugby is one of Finland’s ‘minority’ sports that has grown in popularity in recent years. Image: Ronan Browne / Yle
Finland is a sports-loving nation, with ice hockey and pesäpallo (Finnish baseball) tending to grab the crowds and the headlines.
But is there space too for minority sports — the games brought to Finland by immigrants or embraced by Finns when they lived abroad?
APN heads to a gravel pitch in the Hervanta district of Tampere to attend a two-day cricket tournament, and to hear how one of the world’s most popular sports — with an estimated 2.5 billion fans globally — is also starting to hit Finland for six.
The teams are made up of players from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal — and the organisers want to get more Finnish people involved too.
“If I say one thing, it’s that we want to make cricket popular among the Finns in our community. That one sentence has become our motto,” Nasibur Rahman, chair of Tampere Bengal Sporting — the organiser of the event — tells the show.
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The two-day cricket tournament was played on a gravel pitch in Hervanta, Tampere. Image: Quamrus Samawat
We also join a beginners’ course hosted by Tampere Rugby Club’s women’s team, where a huge number of newcomers to the sport line out to learn the basic skills and rules.
One of the coaches, Kiira Kupiainen, tells the show that rugby is “constantly growing” in popularity in Finland.
“I think something that would describe Finnish rugby and Finns would be sisu,” Kupiainen notes. “It’s a minority sport, but sometimes that brings people together because we want to work for this purpose, to bring this sisu energy.”
And we hear about the fascinating backstory and intriguing rules of jugger — a combat-based, capture-the-flag sport that has its roots in a 1980s dystopian movie.
Richard Jana and his wife set up Jugger Helsinki when they moved to Finland four years ago, and he tells APN why the game hooked him.
“There’s this individual component where you spar duels against one opponent and see who comes out on top, and it’s really technical and there’s lots of strategies and techniques,” Jana explains.
Listen to the episode via this embedded player, on Yle Areena, via Apple
Do foreign sports have a future in Finland?
Do foreign sports have a future in Finland?
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Ronan Browne presented this episode of All Points North, with additional reporting by Matthew Schilke. The sound engineer was Panu Willman.
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