All the Enemies I’ve Made Watching Football

What you looking at, dummy?

The GOATi. Image credit: Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.

Growing up in Finland, a country where football doesn’t really exist, we had only one real enemy: Sweden.

Don’t get me wrong, our western neighbor isn’t one we’d go to war against. That kind of hatred is reserved for Russians.

But Swedes, for whom Finns are a kind of a drunken little brother living out in the woods playing with sticks, were our one and only true sports enemy.

There were plenty of other countries that used to beat us, of course. Canada has been a tough rival in hockey, and Norway tends to beat us in skiing-related sports. But we respect them. We even respect the Russians in the hockey rink.

Not the Swedes, though. They always seemed so superior to us, and they were. We could make it to a final, and they would find a way to beat us 6 to 0. But things do change.

I was 10 when we took our first win over Sweden in a World Cup final, in 1995. The 4–1 victory was made much sweeter by the fact that the games were held in Stockholm that year, and Finland’s head coach was a Swede.

We’ve later beaten Sweden and taken the gold several more times, but the sentiment has not gone anywhere. We do want to win, but if we can’t, we at least have to beat the Swedes.