FC jazz

Pori has never had much time for the clubs across town under different colours, but the sharper needle for Jazz runs down the coast to Turku — a mix-up that still needling supporters get tired of correcting, since visitors half-expect to find the club there instead. What Pori actually built was a team named after its own workers' movement, Porin Pallo-Toverit, put together in 1934 by eighteen young men who had been playing for a local side called Pyrintö and wanted a club of their own inside the country's Workers' Sports Federation.

The name people know now came later, and for an unusual reason: in November 1991 the club renamed itself FC Jazz after the Pori Jazz festival, tying its identity to the city's summer event rather than to any player or patron. That version of the club reached its peak in the 1990s, winning the Veikkausliiga in 1993 and 1996, and went on to test itself in European competition without ever bringing back a trophy from those trips.

It came apart just as fast as it had once climbed. Relegation in 2004 was followed by liquidation in 2005, when the finances gave out entirely. The name survived through the club's own junior set-up, FC Jazz-juniorit, which kept working underneath and was allowed to take up the FC Jazz name again in 2010, rebuilding from the sixth tier upward. The climb back has been slow rather than dramatic — a return to Ykkönen in 2013, then a place in what became the third tier after the 2024 restructuring of the league system.

Home games are played at Porin Stadion, known on its artificial pitch as the Panda Turva Areena, in black and red. Little of what made the club in the 1990s survived into the version rebuilt from junior football, and the current side is still closer in feeling to that rebuilding project than to the two league titles two decades ago.