Comment: The Finnish football team should hope for the KuPS championship

Football The Veikkausliiga culminates on Saturday in the most wonderful way possible. The battle for the championship is completely open, and the trophy driver has to draw a lottery between Kuopio and Tampere.

KuPS starts the final round from the top spot, it is two points ahead of Ilves. However, Ilves has a clearly better goal difference, so if Tampere beat SJK in Tammela, KuPS must beat HJK in their own game.

KuPS also does that. Not because HJK, the blood enemy of the modern era, doesn’t want to seriously beat the carts, but because KuPS has played much better football than HJK throughout the season.

KuPS is its captain Petteri Pennanen with the lead also showed incredible stretching ability in tight places. It has come from behind in the final moments both in the semi-finals and the final of the Finnish Cup.

From the championship two teams that have followed very different paths are fighting. Whereas Ilves is in a financial and playing boom, KuPS, which has been making huge losses year after year, started austerity last winter.

Ilves plays at the brand new Tammela stadium, which is probably the most beautiful football arena in Finland. Its audience average is 6,000 spectators and at the same time the top reading in HJK’s league.

KuPS plays in the wretched Väre arena, which has lived up to its time, and is not suitable for European games beyond the first qualifying rounds.

Although Jani Honkavaara coached by KuPS has played great and entertaining futsal, the bright spot of the season has been the cheerful Ilves. Joonas Rantanen the troops’ versatile, carefully honed but free-flowing offensive game has been exhilarating to watch.

Whereas KuPS is equal to the main owner and chairman Ari Lahti and the team’s budget equals the amount that Lahti decides to burn at any time, Ilves builds a strong financial base for the future with the help of its stadium and the club’s hockey division.

Ilves is clearly the team of the future, while KuPS always has to worry about how long Lahti can manage to finance the championship hunt out of sheer love for the hometown club.

Which championship should Finnish football fans hope for? Well, of course KuPS.

Reason is pragmatic. The championship of KuPS would bring about 3.7 million euros to the Veikkausliiga teams, much more likely than the championship of Ilves. The amount would be more than 300,000 euros per team.

That amount will be distributed to other Veikkausliiga clubs as so-called solidarity money, if the Finnish team clears its way to the Conference League series stage. KuPS’s route there would be significantly easier than Ilves’s.

KuPS has been a regular guest of the European qualifiers for a long time, which has accumulated its team points pool. Next summer it will have 10.0 team points on its plaque, while for example HJK had 11.5 this summer. Ilves has 3.0 team points.

So what is the significance of these? The team points determine which teams are placed in the draws of the different qualifying rounds. The more team points there are, the more likely it is to get into the ranks and face an unranked team. As a rule, the fastest opponents are unranked.

KuPS’s path from the first qualifying round of the Champions League to the series stage would be very similar to that of HJK ​​in recent years, and as we know, HJK is now in the series stage of a Euro competition for the fourth time in a row.

Ilves’ road would be rockier, as it would probably be Unranked from the start.

Of course, Ilves would be allowed to play all their European games in their handsome stadium, while KuPS would be embarrassingly evacuated, but even in this sense, you can think that KuPS’s championship and European success would be an advantage for Finnish football.

Perhaps playing the historic series stage in Helsinki, Tampere or somewhere far from Kuopio would finally wake up the city’s decision-makers to the fact that the city needs to get a proper playing arena.