Livonian Winter League – a friendly pre-season competition between Latvian and Estonian clubs which first took place at the beginning of 2024 – will not be coming back for 2025 owing to lack of interest from the Latvian side.
A new pre-season friendly tournament first introduced earlier this year was generally well received by participating clubs and was considered a success by the Football Federations of Latvia and Estonia, even attracting attention from international publications, most notably The Guardian.
The inaugural edition proved popular with the clubs and the players, especially from the smaller clubs, who appreciated the opportunity to prepare for the upcoming season by playing international friendlies against unfamiliar opponents. For example, back in January, FC Kuressaare captain Märten Pajunurm summarised the popular sentiment in an interview to soccernet.ee as follows:
Fantastic! Whoever developed this plan – big praise! Otherwise you play with the same squads five or six times every year, now you can play against guys from a different culture that you’ve never seen. You can even travel – although this trip is to Latvia, but still. Kuressaare doesn’t travel abroad much, it’s actually cool too. Great idea, very nice pre-season games
However, the Latvian Football Federation announced yesterday that due to disagreements between themselves and Latvian clubs, they could not guarantee participation and will have to withdraw. The competition, organised by Estonia in 2024, was set to be led by Latvia in 2025.
However, the current CEO of Latvian Virsliga, Maksims Krivunecs, was more critical in his assessment of the Latvian Football Federation on his social media, suggesting that the federation was unwilling to spend money of pitches and referees because it had no publicity to gain from spending time and money on organising a friendly tournament:
It’s not about disagreements with the clubs. LFF simply doesn’t have the funds or doesn’t want to cover costs like referees and pitch rent to organize the pre-season tournament, as it was agreed with the clubs in 2024. As far as I know, Latvian clubs want to participate.
With Livonian Winter League cancelled for the foreseeable future, Estonian clubs can now participate in the Estonian Winter Cup, while Latvian clubs will have to take care of their pre-season preparation needs independently.