The Name Of The Game

An age old discussion about the name of the sport of floorball was restarted by the highest of the parties, IFF. This time the issue seems to be twofold: make the name of the sport itself be floorball in every language and make sure everyone uses the hashtag #floorball in discussions related to the sport in any language. The discussion about the proposal has been going on in Twitter for a while now and after the Swedes started talking about it the leading executive of the Finnish Floorball Federation Jari Kinnunen's tweet started the discussion in Finland as well.

Namechange to Floorball? Kansainvälinen Salibandyliitto IFF suosittelee kansallisiinkin twiitteihin käytettäväksi hashtagia #floorball 1/3
— Jari Kinnunen (@kinnuin) January 10, 2014

The discussion sparked this blog post as I felt I could not express my feelings properly in Twitter's 140 characters. Here is how I see the proposal and my views on it as well as some questions that are still left unanswered.

Let's All Use #floorball

The only reason for this I can see is that it would (artificially) inflate the usage of the hashtag and increase the possibility of it trending some day. I can see that as a valid argument only if you have no clue how hashtags are supposed to work, namely as ways to categorize tweets. If everyone who is tweeting about floorball in Finnish or Swedish would use the hashtag its usage would increase tenfold or more but at the same time its usefulness would be killed completely. An American using #floorball to find more tweets about floorball would be presented with a few readable tweets in the midst of tons of tweets he had simply no idea what they mean. He would stop using the hashtag right then and there and he would be left with no way to find relevant content in Twitter.

On the point of getting #floorball to trend in the global Twitter, do you understand how many people are actually tweeting about the trending topics? Justin Bieber has almost 50 million followers (three times as many as there are people in Finland and Sweden combined) and if he posts anything even a little interesting he gets 200000+ retweets and who knows how many favorites. If there's a hashtag in his tweet it will get such a massive amount of visibility there is nothing the people in the tiny nordic countries can do to top it. What needs to happen to get floorball to trend? We need to get the masses in US interested in floorball. But they will use the hashtag naturally because it's in their language!

Let's Change The Name To Floorball In Every Language

 The argument for this has been branding. The secretary general of IFF, John Liljelund, said in his op-ed that there have been problems when trying to talk to people of Central European countries about floorball because they haven't known the word floorball. A loose translation of the relevant paragraph:
One of floorball's problems is the international name of the sport, or more precisely the multiplicity of the names. When we talk about floorball people shake their heads and say they've never heard of the sport. But as soon as someone mentions unihockey or innebandy they go yeah, we used to play that in school.
My question here is this. If you go talk to a Swiss in German do you assume they know English language name of the sport? Why not learn and use the name of the sport in the language used in the area? This has never been seen as an issue in any other sport.

The biggest issue, and the one that hits closest to home, is that floorball as a word simply does not fit into the Finnish language context. It is not a word that can be bent as a word in Finnish has to be. Even if the official name would be changed it would never feel natural and most likely a bastardized version of the word would become de-facto in Finland thus nullifying the efforts to standardize the name.

My View

Both of these proposals seem strange to me. The hashtag proposal is just plain stupid and probably reflects ignorance more than anything else but the name change also sounds weird. I cannot see what the concrete benefits of changing the name would be. There would need to be translations of any materials anyway so translating the name of the sport itself would not be a big deal. Likewise if someone doesn't know of the sport already the name will not make any difference whatsoever.

The only reason for all this I can see is the goal IFF set to itself: get to the olympics sooner rather than later. Now they are running out of real stuff to do and in panic coming up with all kinds of weird suggestions that might help without doing the due diligence and actually first studying the effect of said changes.

Both of these issues would be moot if there was more genuine English language discussion and content about floorball. In my view IFF should, instead of suggesting these weird gimmicks, throw resources at producing such content and sparking such discussions. There's a saying in Finland that goes something like this: the water carried into the well will not stay there.

I am not an IFF insider so I don't know anything more than what has been publicly stated so I might be well off with my conclusion. If you know more, please let me know in the comments below. And most importantly, if you can explain to me how these changes are supposed to help promote the sport concretically I'd be more than happy to change my opinion. What I've heard so far is just wishful thinking with no connection to reality.