Long distance Veikkausliiga - how far between the clubs?

In the arrival of a new season, the weather is causing grief and the usual arguments about the use of artificial turf are rife. But we're also welcoming back RoPS (Rovaniemi Palloseura), who play 5km south of the Arctic Circle. Their opening 2013 fixture is at home to IFK Mariehamn this Sunday.

Mariehamn player Patrick Byskata tweeted on Saturday that they had spent five hours on a boat (just to get to the mainland) then fourteen hours on a train - just to get to the game, along with the return journey. Not quite planes, trains and automobiles, but not far away.

The IFK Mariehamn bench at Rovaniemi

So I've put together a table of the distances between each city (not each team's home stadium), so we can see roughly how far the away side needs to travel. The shown distance is accepted as the most suitable land/sea transport, not as the crow flies, using Free Map Tools. Obviously TPS to Inter is zero... All distances shown are in kilometres.

Click to enlarge

I'll let you pick out which numbers are of interest - Honka (Espoo) to HJK (Helsinki) is the nearest at 21km.

A couple of talking points - Janne Oivio pointed out that in previous league meetings between IFK Mariehamn and RoPS, the away team has never won. The other raises the question about the league structure: Because the teams play three matches, this increases the advantage of the team which plays at home twice, in 2013 is it IFK Mariehamn who will have to make the journey twice.

To give this some relevance to English football fans, the longest trip between current league clubs is Newcastle to Plymouth at 657km.

There's no opinions here, just chucking some numbers at you. But you can see why the Kakkonen is split into geographical areas. I'm looking forward to seeing RoPS' home record at the end of the season.