Santa's Squad and Chicken Wings: Inside Finnish Football's Gloriously Bonkers Cup Draw

Up in Lapland, there's a football club called FC Santa Claus – and no, they don't play at Christmas. Arctic temperatures and a frozen pitch rather put the kibosh on that, which is probably a relief given the media circus that engulfs them every December. Their postal workers and tourism industry employees have to wait until the new year to get serious about football again, and when they do, there's only one competition worth their while: the Suomen Cup.

Last season proved instructive for the festive-themed outfit. Their reserves had a go in Round 0, dispatching Kolarin Kontio – a club from the far north that also happens to organise the Kontio Masquerade, where locals dress up as Jesus Christ, the Duracell Bunny and Elmo – before bowing out in the first round. The senior side fared better, beating Ajax-Sarkkiranta from Oulu (not the Dutch lot), then sixth-tier outfit KTU, before running into FC Hercules in round three. Yes, really.

The Beautiful Chaos of Finnish Football Names

The Suomen Cup is basically a festival of gloriously ridiculous club nomenclature. FC Chicken Wings exists. So do AC Stasi, Flamingo United, and the incomparably named FC Sexy Pöxyt – which translates as FC Sexy Pants. Then there's FC Kiffen, whose name means "to smoke weed" in German and whose kits have apparently been spotted from Leipzig to Leverkusen. These clubs will all be diving into the hat when the draw happens on 29 January.

Four Hours of Pure Draw Drama

Speaking of the draw: it's an absolute marathon. With hundreds of clubs participating – stretching from the Arctic Circle down to the Åland Islands – last season's YouTube broadcast clocked in at over four hours. The Finnish FA have even had a laugh about it, posting a meme on Instagram comparing the draw's length (4h10m) to Lord of the Rings (2h58m) and Titanic (3h14m). The FIFA World Cup draw looks positively snappy by comparison.

The tournament wasn't always this sprawling. Until 2022, the Suomen Cup featured a group stage before transitioning to knockout rounds. Scrapping that system has had a dramatic effect: participation jumped to a record 420 clubs in 2025, with 417 registered for this year's competition.

Multiple Trophies, Multiple Dreams

Part of the appeal is that there's more than one prize to chase. Tomi Leivo-Jokimäki, an executive at the Finnish FA, explained the structure to The Sweeper Podcast: the competition now incorporates the Regions Cup for mid-level clubs and the Roots Cup for lower-league outfits, with the top eight from each category qualifying for separate finals held on the same weekend.

"I think that's the main reason why most of the lower-league clubs take part," Leivo-Jokimäki said, "because they want to be involved in that."

The main Suomen Cup trophy itself has a rather peculiar claim to fame. "There is one similar trophy in the world," Leivo-Jokimäki noted with a chuckle. "It is the one for Crufts, the dog show." The Finnish Cup and the world's biggest dog show in Birmingham – which runs for over four days and attracts some 20,000 dogs – apparently have identical trophies, both made in England during the 1990s. How that happened remains a mystery, but it's yet another delightful oddity in a competition already bursting with them.

The draw airs today on YouTube. If you've got a spare four hours and fancy watching 417 clubs learn their fate, you know where to find it.