Could Finland Do What Norway Just Did?

Norway’s World Cup run ended when England beat them 2-1 after extra time in a quarter-final in Miami. But the exit doesn’t take much away from what came before it. Erling Haaland and Martin Ødegaard, the two faces of a generation that has dominated Premier League highlight reels for years, had just taken their country further at a World Cup than it had ever been, after 28 years of watching the tournament from home. It’s the kind of story that makes neighbouring football nations ask an obvious question: if Norway could end a near three-decade wait and reach a quarter-final on the first attempt back, why not us?

For Finland, the question carries extra weight. Unlike Norway, which had at least tasted the World Cup before (1938 and 1994, then again in 1998), Finland has never appeared in the men’s tournament at all. Not once, in over a hundred years of trying.

Two Similar Countries, Two Very Different Football Stories

Here’s what makes the comparison genuinely interesting rather than just a lazy Nordic-neighbour headline: Finland and Norway are almost identical in population, both sitting around 5.5 million people. The nature and climate are highly similar, and neither has a footballing tradition to rival the game’s traditional powers. If population size and climate were the deciding factors, the two countries should be producing roughly comparable results.

They haven’t. Norway reached the World Cup twice in the 1990s under Egil “Drillo” Olsen, whose direct, long-ball system briefly put them among the best teams in the world — Norway sat second in the FIFA rankings for a stretch in 1993. They got to the round of 16 in 1998 and qualified for the Euro 2000, and exited after the group stage. However, since then, the nation hasn’t qualified for either tournament.

For Norway, it has been 28 dark years until this year, when they repeatedly beat the odds and reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup and climbed 12 steps on the FIFA rankings, and currently sits in 19th position. Many pay n play casinos in Finland have been offering odds on the team’s matches, and many Finns have surely been betting on their neighbouring country’s success.

Finland’s best FIFA ranking, by contrast, is 33rd, reached in 2007 after a qualifying campaign for Euro 2008 that ended one agonising draw away from the finals, against Portugal. Today, they are ranked at 75th, so they are miles behind.

Finland’s only appearance at a men’s major tournament came at Euro 2020, delayed into 2021, when a squad built around Teemu Pukki and a famously tight defensive structure under Markku Kanerva went through as group winners ahead of Greece. That team’s ceiling was the group stage. It was still a landmark moment — the “Huuhkajat” (Eagle Owls) had waited over a century for it.

What Actually Ended Norway’s Drought

Norway’s 28-year absence wasn’t broken by a sudden change in football culture or a new generation of participation numbers. It was broken by something much more specific: two or three individually world-class players arriving in the same generation, under a coach who had been given time to build continuity around them.

Ståle Solbakken took over in December 2020 and, by his own admission, nearly lost the job after Norway missed out on Euro 2024, finishing third in their group. What changed wasn’t the underlying quality of the squad — Haaland and Ødegaard were already elite by then — it was qualifying draw luck combined with a team finally clicking tactically. The 2026 World Cup qualifying campaign was as close to perfect as international football gets: eight wins from eight games, 37 goals scored, five conceded, capped by a 4–1 win away against Italy that handed the Italians their first-ever home defeat in World Cup qualifying.

That’s the uncomfortable truth for any country hoping to replicate it. Norway’s breakthrough required a Haaland-level generational talent. Finland has never produced one.

Finland’s Numbers Tell a More Complicated Story

It would be easy to conclude that football simply isn’t popular enough in Finland to compete. The data doesn’t support that as cleanly as it might seem.

Football is, by registered player numbers, Finland’s most-practised team sport — well ahead of ice hockey. The Football Association of Finland counts well over 100,000 registered players across roughly a thousand member clubs, more than hockey’s licensed player base. Youth participation is broad: football, alongside ice hockey, cycling, swimming and skiing, consistently ranks among the most common hobbies for Finnish children.

What football lacks in Finland isn’t participation. It’s prestige, media weight, and — closely related — the money and infrastructure that follow a sport when it’s treated as the national obsession. Ice hockey holds that position. It’s the sport with international championship pedigree (multiple World Championship titles, an Olympic gold in 1995 and 2022), the one that stops the country when the Leijonat play, and the one that has historically pulled the best coaching resources, media coverage and corporate sponsorship toward it. A talented Finnish teenager choosing between the two sports is choosing between a domestic culture that reveres hockey and a football pathway that, while active and well-organised at grassroots level, doesn’t offer the same cultural payoff or, until recently, the same realistic route to major-tournament football.

That gap has been narrowing. The success of the Euro 2020 squad and the women’s national team (“Helmarit”) has visibly increased football’s standing over the past several years, and Veikkausliiga clubs have invested in new stadiums in Tampere, Vaasa and Seinäjoki. Finland’s under-21 side also qualified for the 2025 European Championship, a sign that the pipeline behind the senior team isn’t empty.

So, Realistically — Could It Happen?

Finland’s most recent World Cup qualifying campaign, for the 2026 tournament, ended in third place in their group behind the Netherlands and Poland — competitive, not embarrassing, but not close either. Teemu Pukki, the team’s talisman for over a decade, played his final international in November 2025. The current senior generation doesn’t have a player operating at Haaland or Ødegaard’s level, and there’s no realistic path to World Cup qualification that doesn’t eventually require one.

That’s not the same as saying it’s impossible. Norway’s own case shows how quickly the picture can change: a golden generation aligning with a favourable qualifying draw and a stable coaching setup turned a team that nearly sacked its manager in 2023 into World Cup quarter-finalists in 2026. Football is also structurally more forgiving to smaller nations than it once was — Euro 2020 already proved a 24-team format gives a country like Finland a realistic route to a major tournament, and an expanded 48-team World Cup from 2026 onward narrows that same gap for future qualifying cycles, even if this year’s edition came too early for Finland to benefit.

What Finland is missing isn’t a fanbase, a domestic structure, or even competitive relevance — it’s the outlier individual talent that Norway happened to produce twice in the same generation. Whether that shows up is largely down to chance. History suggests it eventually will for most footballing nations of Finland’s size; it simply hasn’t yet.