VIFK Women

Second place in Naisten Ykkönen in 2024 was enough: it sent the women of VIFK up to the Kansallinen Liiga for the 2025 season, and put a Vaasa side back among the names that decide the Finnish title. The climb had a quieter first step twelve years earlier, when the team won Group C of Naisten Kakkonen, then the third tier.

Tomi Kärkkäinen took the team into that top-flight season. He had already coached at the club, on the men's side, which in a set-up like this one is less a move than a change of pitch time — the women's section sits inside Vasa IFK rather than beside it, sharing the ground, the blue and white, and record books in which the two teams are often filed together.

Those men's records hold three Finnish championships, the last of them in 1953. The women's side has no top-division trophy, and arrived in 2025 with the season itself as the thing to survive.

Home is Hietalahti Stadium, listed in most fixtures under its sponsor's name, Lemonsoft Stadion. It holds 6,009, every place seated.

The initials on the shirt went missing for twelve years. In 1988 the club merged with BK-48 and played as BK-IFK, and it was not until 2000 that the older name came back. What came back with it was Vasa IFK — the multi-sport society formed in Vaasa in 1900, out of which the football teams, women's and men's alike, have always been one department among several.