The problem of the Olympic Stadium became concrete in the Super Cup

Karim Benzema was the character of the pitch when Real Madrid won their first trophy of the season in Helsinki. Jussi Eskola

A sold-out crowd of around 30,000 crowded into the loft of Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium on a warm Wednesday evening. The Super Cup match between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt was, in terms of the entire event, the biggest single football game that has ever been played in Finland.

Possibly also the biggest single sports match.

Getting the match to the Helsinki Olympic Stadium was quite a remarkable achievement. At the same time, one could hope that similar major matches would continue to be played in Finland.

However, it is not very likely.

Of course, Finland, together with Sweden, Norway and Denmark, is applying for the Women’s European Championships in 2025. As we saw this summer, the number of spectators is on the rise at women’s international matches.

The Olympic Stadium would be perfectly suited as a stage for the first group and possibly a couple of follow-on games. It’s hardly worth dreaming about the final. In Sweden’s western neighbor, Solna, there is a Friends arena, which would be a clear choice for the stadium of the final match.

AIK’s home arena can hold 50,000 spectators. It is the largest football stadium in the Nordic countries. In 2017, the Europa League final was played there.

When the renovation project of the Olympic Stadium started, there was a reason to be upset in the football community.

The uproar grew even more when the price tag of the new stadika grew. 337 million euros were spent on the Olympic stadium, while the Friends arena was built with 300 million.

At that price, the spectator capacity of the Olympic Stadium was quite modest. It is still suitable for Helmari or Huuhkajie’s matches, but the Super Cup concretely showed how small the stadium is in international comparison.

15,000 additional spectators would definitely have bought a ticket for the match if there had been capacity. Now the seats for the media alone took up about half of the capacity of the main grandstand.

The Super Cup is not a very prestigious trophy even among the teams, more like just a nice bonus at the beginning of the season. Still, the teams filled the stands.

A football event bigger than this can hardly be organized at the Olympic Stadium. That’s a huge shame.

Less surprisingly, it was the Frankfurt fan base that continued to make noise throughout the nineties. Last spring, tens of thousands of the team’s supporters traveled to Barcelona.

Die Adler supporters are used to the fact that wherever they travel, an away game is treated like a home game for them.

For a moment, however, the silence ends with the opening sequence. Karim Benzema won a seemingly impossible header from a corner kick. Casemiro passed to David Alaba, who finished into the empty net.

If Los Blancos didn’t take command in the stands, they did it on the field in the second period. Vinicius Junior found Benzema who tapped in to make it 2-0 and the game was all but sealed in the 65th minute.

Benzema’s good memories from Helsinki continued. Last November, he was wearing a French jersey, ruining Huuhkajie’s World Cup qualification dreams on the same green.

At no point was the atmosphere any more special than at Huuhkajie’s home matches. Pohjoikaarre and the songs that captivate the audience make national matches much more atmospheric – especially if the fans are bulging like they were on Wednesday.

The renovated Olympic Stadium is beautiful, still historic, but not very practical for big football matches. Running tracks between the field and the stands eat up a large part of the atmosphere.

To Finnish football The Super Cup did not leave any significant mark.