Helsinki and its Olympic Stadium await Real Madrid with open arms. The Finnish capital will host the Whites next week for the European Super Cup, on Wednesday the 10th against Eintracht Frankfurt starting at 9:00 p.m. (Movistar Champions League). The white expedition will land a day earlier on Tuesday the 9th around 2:00 p.m. local time (Helsinki is one hour ahead of Spain); Madrid will stay at the Hilton Helsinki Strand, less than three kilometers by car from the Olympic. It will be the official premiere of the white season and, above all, the first challenge of a challenge never before achieved by Madrid: win the six titles at stake in one season.
Ahead will be Eintracht Frankfurt who will arrive much more grounded: they have played four friendlies and two official matches, while Madrid have only played three friendlies, although they finished their American tour with great feelings after beating Juventus 2-0. Of course, the battle in the stands is lost in advance: Eintracht sold out the 8,000 tickets that UEFA had for each team, while Madrid barely requested 1,800. UEFA (which keeps almost 5,000 for commitments with sponsors of the total capacity of 31,500) also put another 17,000 on sale to the general public, which quickly sold out; it is to be hoped that a good part of that lot has ended up in the hands of Eintracht fans, who last year already demonstrated their ability to move en masse around Europe, bringing more than 30,000 fans to the Camp Nou for the quarterfinal dispute. the Europa League.
Madrid is not only playing for the honor and the possibility of starting the course by raising a cup. Also money: both teams are guaranteed 3.8 million for their participation, to which the winner will add 1.3 more for a total of 5.1. And all this in the middle of a thermal jump to which Eintracht will be much more adapted: Madrid will go from the maximum 37 degrees in Madrid to 20 that are expected at the time of the match, with a humidity of 63%.
An Olympic stadium… that almost wasn’t
Construction of the Helsinki Olympic Stadium began in 1934 and was completed in 1938 in the hope of hosting the 1940 Olympic Games, which had originally been awarded to Tokyo. but to which the Japanese capital had to give up after the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945). However, the Second World War forced the suspension of that edition and Helsinki had to wait until 1952 to host a Summer Games, with its brand new stadium with a capacity for 70,000 spectators; today, After the last reform carried out between 2016 and 2020, the usual home of the Finnish team can barely accommodate half (36,200) and the capacity for the Super Cup will be only 31,500.
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The stadium has an adjoining 72.71-meter-high lookout tower, a tribute to Finnish javelin thrower Matti Järvinen’s triumph at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.; With that distance he set what was an Olympic record at the time, on a day of glory for Finnish sport: silver and bronze went to Matti Sippala and Eino Penttilä, also Finns.
In addition to sports activities (apart from football, it has hosted ice hockey games and athletics events), it is common for it to receive massive concerts (the Rolling Stones, U2, Dire Straits, Michael Jackson, Metallica… have passed through there). and it was home for years to Bubi, an eagle owl that in 2007 paralyzed a qualifying match for Euro 2008 between Finland and Belgium for ten minutes. Months later, he was named Citizen of the Year.
