Hockey is definitely 1 in Finland. In Norway I'm not sure what's the biggest sport, it's either skiing or football, with womens handball after. Hockey isn't really on the radar.
Small countries have less resources than big ones, which tends to lead into centralizing. Norway, a nation of five million, has sports more popular than hockey, which means that all resources are pooled up on those and most youth tend to pick them up as well.
It's the same reason why hockey is so inherently popular in Finland. Success breeds success. Most resources are pooled in hockey, leaving other sports more or less in secondary position. To simplify: If you have 30 talented guys, and 25 of them decide to form a hockey team, you don't have enough left to form a soccer team from the rest. It's the same, but in bigger scale.
I thought this is the stuff they teach in schools. Demographics 101.
As a Finnland regular I have to agree to all this, but at the end of the day Finnland is a very nationalistic country(even worse than Germany!). They're always gonna be into the sport where Finns are at the top of the list. From the people I've met in Finnland, I can tell you that most of them arent into hockey on a daily basis, and barely know more than 10 nhl players(8 of them are Finnish+Crosby+Ovechkin). I cant tell how important the SM-Liiga is to them, but I feel like I know more about the league than most guys who live over there. Their main focus is the Olympics and the IIHF, being extremely passionate(in other words drunk) about their own team and still never heard of a certain amount of players on their team.
To draw a conclusion, I have the feeling that its Finnlands nr.1 dream to qualify for the football world cup one day, which will be the day soccer takes over the "hockey"-nation. Selanne is one of the finnish heros, but I feel like he is a couple inches behind Jari Litmanen(football player), in terms of legendary status.
Oh yeah, this was a thread about Germany, haha, and hockeys popularity. Im quite certain the FIFA, UEFA, DFB and DFL have not got 1% interest for another sport on the rise in the Germany. The cake is already split up, not willing to share pieces with anyone else. The #3 NHL draftpick this year got like a small sidenote on the newspapers, right after the horse dressage news. I really thought the 2014 NHL entry draft might increase NHL's/hockey's popularity, but people couldnt care less since its THE World Cup right now, as if there was only one world cup, and only one sport that makes sense to watch.