From Funerals to Flares: Europeanisation of Finnish Football Supporter Culture

Contemporary Finnish football supporter culture demonstrates the tensions between European spectator regulations and the implicit expectations set for the match atmosphere. Football supporters are stereotypically loud, colourful, and boisterous. In Finland, though, football fans were traditionally seen to be silent and impassionate compared to their foreign counterparts. The first attempts to change this image and organise fans into more formal supporter groups occurred in the 1970s, but these early fan clubs rarely survived beyond the first couple of years. The 1990s were a watershed decade as a new generation of supporters began to consciously emulate Italian, British, and Swedish fans to invigorate Finnish supporter culture. This Europeanisation of supporter aesthetics sparked a response from the Football Association of Finland. The authorities took a stricter approach towards the supporter phenomenon, implementing measures set out by the Council of Europe and UEFA to the Finnish context. This regulatory Europeanisation brought the conflict between supporter aesthetics and match safety regulations to Finnish stadiums. In the case of the national team’s supporters, fans and authorities have been able to strike a compromise; at the club level, however the tensions between aesthetics and regulations remain acute.