Vasa IFK (VIFK) is a Finnish football club, located in Vaasa. It was founded in 1900. The club changed its name in 1988 after a merger with another club, BK-48, and was called BK-IFK during the late 1900s. The name was changed back to VIFK in year 2000.
Their representative team moved up to Ykkönen at end of season 2005 which is the second-highest level in Finland. The visit lasted three years and the team was relegated to Kakkonen after finishing 12th place in the 2008 season.
The club has a great history, but has yet to achieve the same kind of success as in the mid-20th century. Vasa IFK have won the Finnish championship three times, in 1944, 1946 and 1953. They were runners-up in 1945 and 1951 and finished third in 1950 and 1955. In 1947 and 1948, Vasa IFK also won the league hosted by the FA. In that time there were two separate leagues due to political circumstances. The other league was hosted by the organisation for the labour clubs, TUL.
The club has also been active in women's football and other sports. In 1949 and in 1964 VIFK was the runner-up for the Finnish championship in bandy.
Vaasa (Finnish: [ˈʋɑːsɑ]; Swedish: Vasa, IPA: [ˈvɑːsa]) is a city on the west coast of Finland. It received its charter in 1606, during the reign of Charles IX of Sweden and is named after the Royal House of Vasa. Today, Vaasa has a population of 66,581 (30 June 2015) (approximately 90,000 in the Vaasa sub-region), and is the regional capital of Ostrobothnia (Swedish: Österbotten, Finnish: Pohjanmaa).
The city is bilingual with 7,001,698,000,000,000,000♠69.8% of the population speaking Finnish as their first language and 7,001,248,000,000,000,000♠24.8% speaking Swedish, but the surrounding municipalities have much higher rates of Swedish-speakers than that.
Over the years, Vaasa has changed its name several times, due to alternative spellings, political decisions and language condition changes. At first it was called Mustasaari or Mussor after the village where it was founded in 1606, but just a few years later the name was changed to Wasa to honor the royal Swedish lineage. Mustasaari (Finnish) or Korsholm (Swedish) remains as the name of the surrounding mostly rural municipality, which since 1973 surrounds the city. The city was known as Wasa between 1606 and 1855, Nikolaistad (Swedish) and Nikolainkaupunki (Finnish) between 1855 and 1917, Vasa (Swedish) and Vaasa (Finnish) beginning from 1917, with the Finnish spelling of the name being the primary one from ca 1930 when Finnish speakers became the majority in the city.
Vaasa Osakeyhtiö is the toponymous printing company of the Pohjalainen newspaper in Vaasa, Finland. It is a part of Ilkka-Yhtymä.
Vaasa may refer to: