Liiga Nationality Breakdown

The internationalization of Finnish ice hockey's top league, Liiga, began in earnest only in the latter half of the 1980s, when especially Canadian and Czech players' numbers started to increase. Until then, there were occasional foreign players in the league, but their proportion of all players remained below five percent. Since then, the proportion of foreign players in the Liiga has risen to over 20 percent.

The first foreign players in the Finnish Championship League (SM-sarja) were the Turkish brothers Feyzi, Murat, Vasif, and Zeyd (surname Ahsen Böre) in the 1930s, as well as Hungarian national team player Laszlo Rona, who played for the Kronohagen team (KIF Helsinki) during the 1940-1941 season, winning the Finnish championship. The first North American reinforcement was Canadian Arthur Pearson, who played for HIFK Helsinki from 1960 to 1962. Pearson originally came to Finland to write his dissertation at the University of Helsinki.

The chart below shows the relative proportions of different nationalities in the Liiga from the 1933-1934 season onwards. Season specific data used in the chart can be found on the nationality totals statistics pages.