In December, I was looking at ways to do things slightly differently - there is a lot more to Finnish football than the national team and Veikkausliiga. Like in England, a lot of the clubs lower down the ladder run on small amounts of money, contributed by locals and operated by fans, volunteers and ambitious coaches. I decided to focus some of the attention onto a couple of teams, one from the Helsinki area and another from my wife's home region of Savo. I've made approaches and the clubs are willing - hopefully we'll give some extra support to these sides, get a few more people through the doors and following on social media.
So I'd like to introduce the first partner club for 2015, Atletico Malmi based in North-Eastern Helsinki. Their team manager Janne Vottonen has sent through some details of the club.
We started from the Seventh division back 2002 and
were actually the worst team of whole Finland that year. Now our first team is
playing already in 3rd Division/Kolmonen (the fourth tier) and is one of the
favourites to get a promotion as far as you ask me. So there's been happening
quite a lot during these 13 years and even before that when MPS/Atletico was
founded in 1993 as a junior team for boys born in 1986. Lot's of good stories
and nice-to-know-facts about the team and what we think about football. I
myself started as Atletico-player in 1998 and became a "general
manager" in 2006 with my colleague V-P Liimatainen. We are still running both teams and we
play mainly in our second team, Atletico Akatemia (5th division/Vitonen). All of the
players in both of the teams are about the same age as we are, mainly 24-28
years old and some of those have a background in other higher level teams but
the spirit and the athmosphere we have is tempting for many of those who decide
they're not good enough to make money by playing.
So that's an introduction to Atletico. I'll be visiting them in June 2015, hopefully the fixtures will be confirmed soon. In the meantime, we would all really appreciate if you could pop along over the course of the year if you're in the area. The club have Facebook and Twitter pages to follow, while there will be regular updates on ETS.
Janne has told me that the club will be looking to produce some merchandise at some point in the Spring - wouldn't your five-a-side teammates be curious to know who this exotic team is that you're supporting? Or your company could invest in shirt sponsorship - we all know a Finnish football jersey doesn't look right without at least ten different logos...
Atletico's first big game of the year will take place on Sunday 15th February at 1830 local time in the second round of the Suomen Cup against the winner of HIFK/3 and HIFK/4...
