Leena Pihanurmi compared sports organizations to social welfare organizations and considered them to belong to a privileged sector of organizations. She wrote that the Ministry of Education and Culture granted a total of 1.28 million euros in subsidies to the Finnish Volleyball Association for the year 2026. According to Pihanurmi, the association's CEO, Karri Virtanen, engaged in efficient Porsche cars, among other things. Pihanurmi urged familiarity with the report from the National Audit Office for the year 2025. According to her, the audit office estimated that approximately 1.2 billion euros in state grants for sports were granted between 2015 and 2024, and identified significant shortcomings in the funding. Pihanurmi described the findings of the report as indicating that the grant policy had maintained old organizational structures and that sufficiently precise goals had not been defined for the grants. She also wrote that the grant criteria did not encourage effective use of funds or impact, and that the effectiveness of general grants had not been assessed for ten years. According to her, the wealth of organizations was inadequately considered in the assessment of grant needs, even though some sports federations were very financially solid. Pihanurmi reported that the report also criticized the fact that the financial risks related to the corporate structures of the organizations were not sufficiently considered, and that the inadequate guidance of general grants was compensated for by special grants. Additionally, Pihanurmi wrote that the distribution agreement from 2020 still affected the distribution of grants among organizational groups. According to her, municipalities had been granted overlapping funding for the same purposes as state funding for sports, and the Ministry of Education and Culture did not monitor whether the state funding for municipalities was used for activities defined by law. #liikunta #urheilu #valtionavustukset (translated)
