ALAN CANE and ANTHONY SHEEHAN

Get the managers on the phone...

Fans at Finnish club PK-35 have their say on tactics via SMS

Here's a Finnish idea that could help save the jobs of soccer managers carrying the can for their team’s wretched performance. Sit up and pay attention, Leicester City’s Peter Taylor.

All this season, decisions about the strategy and tactics of Club PK-35, a side from the small Finnish town of Pukinmäki, have been made not by head coach Janne Viljamaa, but by an army of several hundred "club managers" among the team’s supporters voting using their mobile phones.

It’s a novel way, certainly, of allowing supporters to give expression to their traditional conviction that they could do the job better than the professionals, but here’s the rub: at the beginning of the season PK-35 were bumping around the bottom of Finland’s third division.

Now they are leading the division, and with only a handful of games to go, look set for promotion. Still with us, Peter?

Jussi Rautavirta, an enthusiastic follower of "fantasy football" games, developed the concept of "ClubManager" and took it to Makra, the media group that owns the TV and web rights to all Finnish football.

It operates the country’s leading football portal with more than 10,000 registered users and 1,5m hits a month. Arto Vallila, Makra chief executive, says he saw the service as a valuable extension of its existing sporting interests on TV and the internet: "People ask if this is a joke but it is serious."

Supporters who register as club managers can influence decisions about training methods, choice of players and, during actual matches, substitutions and changes of tactics. Questions such as: Should I replace player A with player B or player C? Are formulated by Viljamaa and transmitted to the club managers’ mobile phones using text messaging.

They have a limited time in which to reply before the votes are counted. Viljamaa has to accept the majority decision. Initially apprehensive, he says he was won over by the fact that he alone is able to devise the questions to be sent to his virtual assistants.

Sami Leinonen, a PK-35 fan who has been a ClubManager from the start, says: "It adds more excitement to the game when you can influence tactics. And if the team wins, you feel you have really done something."

Between three and 10 questions are usually put to the supporters before and during each game. Voting over the phone cost 5FIM, about 50p, which is split between telecoms operator Makra and the club. The questions are designed so that rival supporters, posing as loyal ClubManagers, cannot do damage.

Jani Laitinen, Makra’s chief of new media, says the company is planning to augment the service next season, transmitting, for example, video images from live games to supporters’ phones.

Other football teams, noting PK-35’s dramatic change of fortune, are talking to Makra about participation in the scheme. Laitinen says the principle can easily be extended to other team games.

www.makra.fi

asheenan@packetvideo.com

alan.cane@ft.com