Finland’s national sport is pesäpallo, a bat-and-ball game often called Finnish baseball that Lauri “Tahko” Pihkala built in the early 1920s from North American baseball and older Finnish village ball games. No Finnish law makes it official: the title rests on long convention, and the sport is routinely described as Finland’s national game, while ice hockey is the country’s most-watched sport and cross-country skiing its deepest winter tradition. So the honest answer has three parts. Pesäpallo is the national game by tradition, ice hockey is the national obsession by television ratings, and skiing is the national habit by history.
Tahko Pihkala and the first game at Kaisaniemi in 1920
The game’s inventor was born Lauri Gummerus on 5 January 1888 in the vicarage of Pihtipudas, in central Finland, and later took the Finnish surname Pihkala. In the 1910s he became Finland’s first professional athletics coach and worked as a physical education instructor with the Finnish Army. An avid sports fan who devised several outdoor games, he combined the structure of North American baseball with traditional Finnish ball-batting team games. The result was first played on 14 November 1920 at Kaisaniemi Park in Helsinki, and the rules were developed through the 1920s.
Pihkala’s legacy is not simple. He handled propaganda for a White Guard unit during the Finnish Civil War of 1918, and he supported eugenics as a way of strengthening the army. His influence on Finnish sport was nonetheless enormous. In 1922 he also proposed a Finnish rival to Norway’s Holmenkollen ski festival and named Lahti as the place to hold it; the first Lahti Ski Games followed on 3–4 February 1923. In 1969 he received one of the first honorary doctorates in sport sciences from the University of Jyväskylä, together with President Urho Kekkonen. A memorial by the sculptor Nina Sailo was unveiled in 1988 beside the Helsinki Olympic Stadium.
The game got an international stage when Helsinki hosted the 1952 Summer Olympics, where pesäpallo was played as a demonstration sport. It never entered the Olympic programme, and that is part of its identity: pesäpallo is played seriously almost nowhere except Finland, with small followings in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Finnish communities in northern Ontario. The first Pesäpallo World Cup in 1992 brought together seven nations: Finland, Sweden, Australia, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania and Japan.
The vertical pitch: how pesäpallo differs from baseball
The single rule that separates pesäpallo from baseball is the pitch. The pitcher stands beside the batter at a round home plate and throws the ball straight up, at least one metre above his or her own head. The batter hits it on the way down. Because almost every pitch is hittable, the contest moves away from the duel between pitcher and batter and towards placement, running and tactics. Batters choose between named shots: the snap hit (näpy) to slip runners past fielders, the deliberate fly ball (koppi) that sacrifices the batter, the high drive (kumura), topspun to drop between midfield and outfield, and the bouncer (pomppu), hammered into the ground near the front arc.
A match has two periods of four innings, and each period is won separately. If the periods are shared, an extra inning follows, and if that is level the teams go to a shoot-out-style round, each starting with a runner on third base. Each side has nine batters plus three “jokers”, specialist hitters or runners who can be slotted into the order at any moment. The most visible figure is the manager (pelinjohtaja), who directs the attack with signals from a multicoloured fan. Even the start of the game is ritualised: the captains decide who bats first through hutunkeitto, gripping the bat hand over hand until one of them holds the top.
Superpesis, Sotkamo and the villages that run the sport
The top division has been called Superpesis since its first season in 1990; it replaced the Finnish Championship, the top tier from 1955 to 1989, and was heavily marketed from the start. Today 13 men’s clubs and 12 women’s clubs play a season that runs from May to August, almost entirely in daylight, because only a few grounds have permanent floodlights. The league is run by a limited company owned by the Finnish Pesäpallo Association, and a television deal with Nelonen Media and Yle puts the larger matches on national TV. The annual all-star game is the East–West Match (Itä–Länsi-ottelu).
The map of the sport is unusual for a national game. Pesäpallo is strongest in semi-urban and rural Finnish-speaking municipalities, most of them inland, with some following in Tampere and Oulu, and weakest in the big coastal cities of Helsinki, Turku and Pori. The dominant men’s club, Sotkamon Jymy, comes from Sotkamo in Kainuu, a municipality of about 10,000 people, and has won more Superpesis titles than any other men’s club, including five in a row from 2011 to 2015, each time beating the same opponent in the final. That rival, Vimpelin Veto from Vimpeli in South Ostrobothnia, plays at a ground called the Island Field, and meetings between the two are nicknamed “El Klassikko”. Other men’s champions include Kiteen Pallo -90 from Kitee, Joensuun Maila and Oulun Lippo. In the women’s league, Kirittäret have won 12 titles and Lapuan Virkiä nine.
The league has had bad years. Veikkaus, the state betting company, opened pesäpallo betting in 1993, and the sport went into the deepest crisis in its history after a match-fixing scandal in 1998. The scandal, known as “Black Thursday”, cost Superpesis its television coverage, and in the early 2000s the sport rebuilt its foundations by going back to basics on the field. The audience came back: in 2021 Superpesis matches were streamed more than a million times on Ruutu. The record Superpesis crowd is 7,640, for Hyvinkään Tahko against Sotkamon Jymy in 1992.
Leijonat: why ice hockey is Finland’s most-watched sport
Those attendance figures are why many Finns would name ice hockey if asked about their national sport. The Liiga, founded in 1975 and now a 16-team league, averages several thousand spectators a game, and when Finland met Canada in the 2016 World Championship final, about 69 percent of Finns watched on MTV3. The men’s national team, the Leijonat (“the Lions”), is counted among the “Big Six” of world hockey alongside Canada, the United States, Czechia, Russia and Sweden.
It took Finland a long time to get there. The country’s first elite tournament, the 1939 World Championship in Switzerland, ended in a shared last place with Yugoslavia. The first medal was an Olympic silver at Calgary in 1988, and the first world title came in 1995 in Sweden, when Ville Peltonen scored a hat-trick in a 4–1 win over the hosts, Sweden. Further world titles followed in 2011, 2019, 2022 and 2026, five in all. At the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Finland went through the tournament unbeaten and won its first Olympic gold, beating the Russian Olympic Committee team in the final. Players such as Teemu Selänne, Jari Kurri and the brothers Saku and Mikko Koivu made the game a Finnish export through the NHL. Finland hosted the World Championship in 1965, 1974, 1982, 1991, 1997, 2003 and 2022, and co-hosted the 2012, 2013 and 2023 tournaments.
Ice hockey is not the only sport that outdraws pesäpallo. Formula One has been huge in Finland since Keke Rosberg became the first Finnish world champion in 1982, followed by Mika Häkkinen in 1998 and 1999 and Kimi Räikkönen in 2007. Football has more registered players than hockey (about 115,000 against 60,000) and is the most popular hobby for children aged 3 to 18. Floorball, a Finnish strength, has brought world titles in 2008, 2010, 2016, 2018 and 2024.
Cross-country skiing from Veli Saarinen to Iivo Niskanen
Long before hockey filled arenas, Finland’s winter sporting identity was built on skis. Veli Saarinen won the 50 km race at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, becoming the first Finnish cross-country skier to win Olympic gold, and took three world titles between 1926 and 1934. He later ran the Finnish Skiing Federation from 1947 to 1968. Veikko Hakulinen won three Olympic and three world titles in the 1950s and 1960s; Eero Mäntyranta collected seven Olympic medals between 1960 and 1968; Juha Mieto won relay gold in 1976. Among women, Marjo Matikainen-Kallström won Olympic gold in 1988 and Marja-Liisa Kirvesniemi three Olympic golds. In the modern era Iivo Niskanen, born in 1992, has won three Olympic titles, starting with the team sprint at Sochi in 2014 alongside Sami Jauhojärvi, and the 15 km classic world title at Lahti in 2017.
Finland’s winter strength goes beyond cross-country. In ski jumping it is the most successful nation in Winter Olympic history, with ten golds, eight silvers and four bronzes; Matti Nykänen won four Olympic golds and Janne Ahonen holds the record of five Four Hills Tournament wins. In Nordic combined, Samppa Lajunen won three golds at the 2002 Olympics.
The home of all this is Lahti, about 100 km north-east of Helsinki. Pihkala’s 1923 games grew into an annual three-day festival of cross-country skiing, ski jumping and Nordic combined, held in a stadium where the jumps and the cross-country finish share one arena and capacity approaches 100,000 spectators. Ruka, near Kuusamo in the north-east, also hosts Nordic World Cup races, and it was there in November 2014 that Niskanen won his first World Cup race, a 15 km classic. The country’s long, snowy winters, which the climate of Finland explains, are what made skiing a mass activity rather than an elite one.
Pesäpallo’s claim against hockey and skiing in 2026
If the test is popularity, ice hockey wins comfortably. If it is winter medals and a long history, skiing has the strongest record. Pesäpallo keeps the national title for different reasons. It was designed in Finland, by a Finn, for Finnish conditions, and it has no serious rival abroad that could claim it. Its heartland is small inland towns such as Sotkamo, Vimpeli and Kitee rather than Helsinki, and the sport long drew its strength from village game culture. In the 1980s the association even campaigned under the slogan “Pesis on peleistä suomalaisin”, roughly “pesis is the most Finnish of games”, to keep the sport relevant as villages emptied. The modern men’s Superpesis is still the third most-watched men’s league in Finland, and the women’s league is the most-watched women’s league in the country.
That mix of a home-grown game, an imported favourite and a winter tradition is common in the Nordic countries. Neighbouring Sweden argues over the same three-way split, as our post on the national sport of Sweden shows, and Finland’s hockey rivalry with Canada turns up again in the story of the national sport of Canada.