Comment | The worst loser of the week can be found in the Turku region – KaaPo is now ruining its reputation

Football club Kaarinan Pojat ry turned out to be a bad loser this week. The decision of the Sports Legal Protection Board regarding the treatment of the club’s junior did not suit KaaPo, who started throwing insults at the parents of the complainant and Turku Sanomat also junior’s playing skills.

I wrote about the sports legal protection board’s decision in question the news, and I had no intention of returning to the subject after that. KaaPo’s Friday night release however, the solution gave cause for comment.

Let’s repeat briefly the background of the solution. The parents of a player from the football club Kaarina Pojat ry complained about how the team’s new father coach favored his own child. It was decided to transfer the 11-year-old child of the parents who complained about unfair favoritism to another team.

The appellant and his parents applied for an amendment to the forced transfer from the Sports Legal Protection Board, which in its decision stated that the forced transfer must be annulled as restricting member rights in a prohibited manner.

The matter could have been left at that, but KaaPo decided to question the correctness of the solution in its press release.

KaaPo pointed out that the board’s decision was justified by the fact that the child’s interests should be taken into account and the child should be heard, but according to KaaPo, it was not even possible due to the parents’ wish. Based on the e-mail I saw, KaaPo’s claim is not true, because the parents were ready for the child to be heard at the board meeting before he was expelled from his own group.

In its announcement, KaaPo did not mention the core of the board’s decision. The Sports Legal Protection Board considered that the club’s decision to forcibly transfer the child to another team in the middle of the season was decisively influenced by grounds based on a dispute between the appellant’s parents and the team’s coaches, which violated the appellant’s equal treatment and restricted the appellant’s membership rights in a prohibited manner.

Appellant’s a top expert in sports law acted as the parents’ representative in the case Olli Rauste.

Rauste says he was surprised that the board paid strong attention to the fact that the child should have been heard. The appellant’s parents did not even refer to that in their complaint.

The decision of the Sports Legal Protection Board is a significant decision, as it states that a player cannot be forcibly transferred from one team to another in the middle of the season if the best interests of the child are not realized.

“Sports clubs still think that children and young people are the club’s inputs that can be moved from one place to another,” says Rauste.

In Rauste’s opinion, KaaPo’s announcement shows that the board’s decision was painful.

“In his time, world champion in ski orienteering Olavi Svanberg was an honest basic athlete with a good saying. When the games are on, that’s when we fight, but when the results are on the board, let everyone respect the results. Good luck to the winners, and practice to the losers,” says Rauste.

Sports KaaPo, which received a negative decision in the legal protection board, could now look at the scoreboard, respect it and continue training. KaaPo is a prestigious junior club and its chairman Olli Tuominen respected social worker. KaaPo is now trying to clean up his reputation, but is only hurting himself.