Back in Britain
Before graduating, I got a chance to travel to study in Leeds, England, as part of the Erasmus exchange program. I have chosen the exchange program at Leeds Beckett University because this university was offering the courses in which I was particularly interested in sports finance and sports sponsorship. In addition, Leeds is in England and England is the home of football. The only significant obstacle I had was finalizing my master's thesis. While I have already completed my literature review and data analysis processes in 2018, I still had to report my results, as well as write the discussion and conclusion sections. Since I took both the master's thesis and exchange studies very seriously, there was not much time to travel around and experience England. Yet, I saved some time to travel to several special places, one of which was the home of football.
Visiting The Home Of Football
According to FIFA, the oldest football club in the world is Sheffield Football Club (not to be mixed with FC Sheffield United). Leeds, where I was based, is one hour away from Sheffield by bus! The world's first football club Sheffield F.C. is based next to Sheffield, in a small area called Dronfield. Heritage is considered to be the most valuable intangible asset for sports clubs. As the very first football club in the world, Sheffield F.C. finds itself with the unique advantage of acting as an ambassador of football around the world. From a sentimental perspective, traveling to the home game of Sheffield F.C. was the most memorable experience during my exchange period. Besides visiting the first football club's stadium, I also traveled to see Leeds United and Chelsea stadiums just before my student exchange finished. When I returned from Leeds to Jyväskylä, it took me one month to finalize my Master's thesis and graduate from the University of Jyväskylä! Here it is probably good to share how I have chosen the topic for my master's thesis.
Master's Thesis
From the moment I moved to Jyväskylä, I was interested in the topic of immigrants in Finnish football. I was an immigrant myself and that was the time when the huge influx of refugees moved to Europe from the middle east counties. My interest was the integration of immigrants into the Finnish society through sport. My working experience in Kajaani with KajHa in 2016-2017 was strongly linked to immigrants from Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the junior teams I was coaching included 10 Afghani boys who arrived in Finland, as asylum seekers. There were quite many issues we experienced together. I could see that football was a strong motivator towards a voluntary change of behavior towards more socially acceptable in Finland. As an immigrant myself, I was particularly interested to learn the key features that Finns and immigrants could point out, as the key differentiators between locals and foreigners. That's how I started researching the topic of social integration through sport. Personally, my thesis helped me to formulate the 5 key challenges that immigrants, like myself, face within the work environment in Finland. These challenges include the Finnish language, the value of commitment, values of responsibility and reliability, emotional framework, and punctuality. Learning this, helped me a lot with future integrations within work contexts in Finland. For further information, my full thesis is openly available online from:
