Finnish Floorball Champions Esport Oilers Invest in Player Development from Youth to Pro Teams with Firstbeat

Finnish floorball champions Esport Oilers have entered into a new three-year partnership agreement with Firstbeat. The partnership demonstrates Esport Oilers’ commitment to investing in long-term player development by implementing Firstbeat for their 2nd team, U22, and U19 teams in addition to their pro team.

On the partnership, Joel Wenning, Firstbeat’s Customer Success Manager says:

“It’s fantastic to get the Finnish champions on board and assist them in making smarter decisions in training programming, ensuring adequate recovery, as well as the right amount of stress to accelerate player development and success.

In the F-liiga training loads are high, a lot of games are played and many of the players have to work besides playing.  This compounds a lot of stress which is risky. Last season Esport Oilers had a lot of injuries, we can definitely help there to reduce the injury risk, ensure a safe return to play, and shorten the return to play time. Players must be guided based on objective data to manage their load capabilities optimally.”

Investing in the athlete pathway is a crucial long-term investment, and for younger players, Firstbeat provides systematic information and support regarding players’ physical development and physiological requirements at various stages of growth.

Head Coach of Esport Oilers, Aleksi Lammi comments on the partnership:

“We are very happy to start our partnership with Firstbeat. Although we managed to win the title, there is a lot of room for improvement in our daily training load management. In the regular season and especially in the playoffs we had a suboptimal situation: a lot of injured players.

We are very thankful to our physio team that they were able to keep our guys somehow together, but we hope this won’t happen again. Now we are entering the off-season and excited to start training load monitoring with the Firstbeat Athlete App to see if players are doing what they should and if the training effect is the desired one.”

Justus Kainulainen, the captain of the champions, top scorer, best player in the Finnish league, and national team player  also comments on the cooperation with Firstbeat:

“As Aleksi commented, we had very big problems with our injury rate this season and I am extremely happy that our guys managed to push themselves to play the last games with the pain. I am feeling relieved that we have now Firstbeat to guide our training load management to push our performance to the next level and reduce the injury risk”

Firstbeat Sports is an athlete performance management platform that provides coaches with data to support coaching decisions and is an effective tool in assisting athlete development.

About Esport Oilers and Aleksi Lammi:

Esport Oilers is a floorball club based in Espoo, founded in 1990. It’s one of the biggest floorball clubs in Finland. The club was known as Espoon Oilers until 2013, when it changed its name to Esport Oilers after entering into a partnership agreement with the Esport communities. The club’s men’s representative team plays in the F-League, the highest league in Finland. Esport Oilers has won the Finnish Championship five times in 1999, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2024.

Aleksi Lammi won the title in his first full season as head coach in the men’s league. Before that Aleksi garnered success in the youth leagues by winning the title with the Oilers and Happee. In the current title, the head coach Lammi deserves special recognition for how his team performed under pressure. The Oilers won Game 7 in both the semifinals and the finals. Especially in the seventh final, Lammi acted wisely by calling a timeout at the right moment in the final minutes of the game, changing the score from 4-4 to a 6-4 win.

About Firstbeat

Firstbeat provides advanced performance analytics for more than 1,000 sports teams around the world. Firstbeat Sports is the leading athlete performance management platform, providing data on athlete training load, intensity, fitness, performance readiness, stress, and recovery to optimize performance, reduce injury risk, and fast-track athlete development.