The Other World Cup
People are shaped by the places they come from. A shared heritage, language, and real or imagined ethnic ancestry can also play a part. All of these often overlap and conflict with the nation-states and arbitrary borders resulting from migrations, wars, colonialism, and chance. This goes far beyond the misunderstood and opaque bundles of rights attributed to ‘ownership’ of land and ‘citizenship’, which I wrote about in previous posts.
The fact is that the concept of the ‘state’ with clearly defined borders, is a convenient and relatively recent political simplification. The requirement for passports to move between them didn't become a common practice until the start of the 1900s. You didn’t need a passport to enter the empires of Macedon, Rome or the Hapsburgs. Even Britain didn't require them until World War One.
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| Barbarians at the gate. Without passports. |
The United Nations (UN) has a view on what and where qualifies as a state. Global organisations provide a stage for the resulting frictions. In world football, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) has its own criteria for membership which are marginally different. Neither recognises some places and people that don't fall within their own convenient criteria.
This post is about a football competition for the inconvenient, those who have fallen off the international conveyor belt. It is run by the Confederation of International Football Associations (CONIFA). Don’t worry. There are no match reports, and this isn’t a rant about those whose football allegiance is mediated by Sky Sports or those who see football as primarily an excuse for a bit of performative bicep-flexing.
The UN first. Even if it recognises a state, other countries might not, and vice versa. Having defined borders and a military probably helps. Many people from places that self-identify as a nation are excluded. They might include the marooned remnants of dismantled empires, tribal societies and diasporas, none of which get a sniff at membership or wider international political recognition.
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| The Tibet team. 1936. |
In short, it's a mess. If you created a map based on how people's allegiances rather than their passports, it would resemble a Rorschach test, even before you tried to situate the nomadic herders, hunter-gatherers, tax exiles, itinerants, and digital nomads who live anywhere exotic that offers sunshine, a coffee bar, and fast WiFi.
One of the best examples of the mess is…….here.
The UK belongs to the UN. It is a state. England, Scotland, and Wales identify as countries but are not states, and are not recognised as such by the UN. Bits of Great Britain are not parts of the UK, or for that matter the European Union, for instance, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, which are Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories which range from sub-tropical Bermuda to the less-than-tropical Falklands. In all, there are seventeen British 'dependent territories'. Prizes if you can name them all.
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| British Bermuda |
How do we define our own allegiances? The older among you might recall the 'Tebbit Test', which used support for the English cricket team as a proxy for loyalty to the UK. Many British citizens would laugh at that, and while the diasporas probably won't see why they should jettison the rest of their personal history just to get a passport and the benefits that flow from paying their taxes.
Personally, I am English by birth and with an ancestry half-splattered across the Irish borderlands. This gives me a bundle of rights c/o my British passport and a much smaller bundle, which doesn’t include residence, c/o my Irish passport. It also means that if I had any talent whatsoever, I could qualify to play for England, both parts of Ireland, and possibly the USA. In spite of that I am a very unexotic part of the exotic melting pot that is London, where I reside by choice.
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Link : London Ethnicity |
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, to create some semblance of a global order from the festering heap of polities and geographies pieced together over time, world governance has become a geopolitical steampunk juggernaut that produces a lot of noise, gas, and hot air (literally!) but not a lot of motion. Parts of it seem to serve no purpose beyond enriching its ruling classes, while many of the bits and bobs discarded in the process have been left to rot.
This isn’t to suggest that we might be better off ditching a system of bounded states within borders with populations by citizenship, and substituting a political geography based on ethnicity, heritage or language. The Nazis embodied the distinction in the maxim 'blood and soil’ and you might also recognise it in Putin’s fanciful attempt to rewrite Russian history as an excuse for irredentism. It is a recipe for irredentism, which would probably result in more wars. Rather, we simply need to recognise and accommodate the tensions.
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| Blud und Boden, Blood & Soil. |
Far away from the rarefied, stultifying, and often irrelevant debates at the toothless UN, these tensions frequently erupt in the culturally more visible arena of world sport. Football has the highest profile. (To my pitifully few American readers, no, your version is a misnamed bastard child born out of a mash-up of proper football, rugby, soused in money, and inviting little global interest. More people follow cricket).
FIFA
Qualification for football's World Cup is determined by FIFA, which is as corrupt and nakedly political as the UN, but more commercial and perhaps more inclusive! So Palestine and Kosovo are in, but Micronesia and a miscellany of other island states from the geographical quiz books are not, mainly because they are too remote and small to field a team.
For instance, Monaco doesn’t make the roster. (It has a team in the French League, but typically, in their last game, none of the starting XI were natives). Meanwhile, Taiwan gets in using the alter-ego of Chinese Taipei. Some people are sooo touchy. And Vatican City is just a tiny, silly relic.
Meanwhile, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are accepted, even though they are not nation-states, in deference to their collective role in introducing the modern game to the world. So is Gibraltar who, asxI write this, are playing the Faroe Islands in a World Cup qualifier. So where does that leave, say, the Isle of Man, whose status isn't that different and which is proud of its unique ‘Celtic’ and ‘Viking’ identity? There is no consistency.
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| Visiting Manxmen |
But, but…..the critical point here is once again that the political map of the globe doesn’t reflect the diversity of its populations, many of which do not neatly identify with a nation-state.
Going back to the world of football and my steampunk analogy, simply because I like it, FIFA is the clanking, belching, monstrous machine trying to hold football’s ill-defined world together while inching it forward. So what happens to the places and people it chooses to ignore, those discarded scraps of empires that crumbled away in the last century, or encapsulating a collective identity not represented by a state, or simply incapable of fulfilling FIFA’s onerous demand to collect revenues while offloading responsibilities?
Do you recall the uninspiring FIFA World Cup in 2018? I don’t. It was hosted by Russia, who have a record of racism and cheating in sport and which, at the time, was below Burkina Faso and the Cape Verde Islands in the international football rankings.
CONIFA
The Confederation of Independent Football Associations (CONIFA) is the football federation for all associations outside FIFA, and it has a tournament for them. Two weeks before the tournament in Russia, the CONIFA Men’s World Football Cup kicked off in London.
In contrast to FIFA’s focus on teams representing states and making megabucks, CONIFA's complicated qualification system aims to reinforce its inclusive principles. The requirements of participants don’t run much beyond those required of a local pub team, i.e. you don’t need to be any good at the game, just to turn up on time and have some kit.
One outcome is that teams in a CONIFA tournament can be dramatically mismatched. Some can field a few players with professional experience, while others have never played on a proper pitch.
For instance, you would expect Padania from Northern Italy to be good, and they are. In stark contrast, in 2014, a team from the refugee camps in Darfur (Sudan) conceded 61 goals in 4 games. They made a film about their efforts. Here is the trailer : Link Not Just Football
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| Darfur United |
The bookmaker Paddy Power provided some sponsorship and arranged for some games to be streamed. I watched several of them but more importantly, had a great day out in the carnival atmosphere of the final, however in what follows, I have to acknowledge some reliance for the rest on a well-researched and funny book on both CONIFA and the tournament by James Hendicott. If you want more detail, particularly on the characters and matches, you can buy it here: www.hendicottwriting.com/conifa-football-for-the-forgotten
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| Barawa |
Handily, the Barawa FA were part of the large Somali diaspora in London, so London ended up providing the venues.
The contestants range from groups isolated from their motherland by wars, pogroms, and the carve-up of old empires (Szekely, Western Armenia), to diasporas or inconvenient minorities and in xenophobic or chauvinist states (e.g. Koreans in Japan), cosplay traditionalists, and people who simply want to assert a right for their place to exist, such as sinking Pacific atolls. Many simply aspire to greater recognition, forbearance, and the dream of independence. Every one of them has a story to tell.
There isn't room to do justice to all of their entertaining, inspirational and sometimes tragic stories here, so at the end of this post, I will list them together with some who appeared in earlier competitions. Top marks if you know where all these teams originate. I certainly got some geography and history lessons along the way.
What most of them have in common is that their relationship with the nation-state on their passport is fractured. Their response varies from the sentimental and performative to the violent. There is no space to relate their varied and often tortured histories here, but if any catch your eye or puzzle you, Wikipedia is there for you!.
It was no easy task to bring them all to London. The crow flying from Tuvalu would travel 10,000 miles without the benefit of a cold omelette or in-flight movie. Most of the players are not professional. So who covers their loss of earnings and supports their families in their absence, pays for the flights, the accommodation and the kit? CONIFA can't contribute much except organisation by its over-stretched volunteers. It has little external funding.
Compared to the English professional game, the crowds at these games are small, the largest numbering a few thousand. In London, attempts to secure the use of one of the league stadia came to naught; those carpet-like pitches need maintenance. Luckily, some larger non-league clubs were happy to help.
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| Sutton United Stadium |
Some will have a volunteer-run bar and a vendor of hot snacks of dubious provenance. There might be a tannoy system with bean-can acoustics and the offer of a paper team sheet. There will not be a big video screen, TV lounge, physio suite, cryo-plunge pools for the players or VIP suites.
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| Bracknell Town Stadium |
Various non-league team stadiums were on the roster. The competition kicked off at the home of Bromley F.C., then in the professional football’s 5th tier, and inconveniently located in the far south of the City. I went to see the final at the home of Enfield F.C., who play in the 6th tier of English football, in what was then known as the Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Enfield. That sounds impressive, but it is situated in Donkey Lane, which doesn’t!
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| Enfield F.C. Stadium |
In order to keep teams involved as long as possible, the competition is structured as a ladder tournament rather than a knock-out. Most seem to have stayed throughout, adding to the crowds and colour.
Off the pitch, the Tibetans had musicians and additional support from fans of Bristol Rovers. I don’t know why. The Korean-Japanese had a massive banner aimed squarely at the geographically-confused, the Cascadians (who had never even met before the tournament) demonstrated a typically North American appreciation of the promotional value of merch, while the Matabeles just made it party time. They mixed with each other and with the crowd. A lot.
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| Mixed Crowd at Dulwich Hamlet |
In addition to all this, you got the usual posse of London’s pet minor-league football eccentrics. My own favourites are John ‘Village’ Atkins, an elderly gentleman who regularly bedecks the entrances to Barnet F.C. with a huge collection of the flags of obscure places, and the supporters from Dulwich Hamlet, flaunting their cosmopolitanism and as proud of their Souvlaki as their team.
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| John Atkins |
For obvious reasons, the teams best supported were those representing a substantial diaspora in London. In the area around Enfield, there are a lot of Turkish Cypriots and quite a few Somalis as well. They were fun. In contrast, at the final, the many Hungarians seemed alone in embodying the more European football cocktail of booze and attitude and the team from the Isle of Man probably took the competitive element a bit too seriously.
Many of the team strips were far more unique and attractive than the identikit designs used by teams in the FIFA finals. By way of colour, some of the team strips are shown below, and you can see designs from both this and previous competitions here: www.footballkitarchive.com/conifa-kits
Kudos to Tibet and Matabeleland, whose design efforts were rewarded by substantial sales of shirts. (The latter also sold Zimbabwean currency for sterling, the novel attraction being that, for the outlay of a few quid, you could become a Zim Dollar billionaire). Their team made a point of thanking the crowd directly for their support; a lot of hugging and handshaking went on. That just about summed it up.
I have seen many England matches at Wembley, but this was much more fun. If it comes around again, and unless you are a stats-head, tactical maven or simply a bigot, go watch and enjoy.
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| Matabeleland |
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| Tibet |
Below is the list of participants in London, in order of their final standing on the ladder. To save words, I have marked those whose principal motivation is an aspiration not to be part of the nation-state who issued their passports, as ‘AI’ simply because it pleases me to rescue the acronym from killer robots and malfunctioning ticketing systems. Please excuse any errors.
Karpatalya (Hungarian population of Ruthenia, now part of Ukraine)
Northern Cyprus (AI)
Padania (Northern Italy. AI)
Szekely Land ( Hungarian population in Romania. AI)
Panjab (Sikh and Punjabi areas straddling northern Pakistan and India. AI)
Cascadia (A 'bioregion' in Western Canada with cessationist delusions)
Western Armenia (An Armenian community in Turkey. AI)
Barawa (The Tunni clan from Southern Somalia, as above)
Abkhazia (A breakaway part of Georgia, recognised by Russia but almost no-one else).
Kabylia (Berbers from Northern Algeria)
United Koreans in Japan (A diaspora)
Tibet (A diaspora from a country perched between heaven and China, ruled by the latter. AI)
Matabeleland (The Matabele tribe inhabit Western Zimbabwe)
Tamil Eelam (The Tamil area in the North of Sri Lanka. AI)
Tuvalu (A small blob in the Pacific, population under 10,000)
Ellan Vannin (A bigger blob in the Irish Sea. The Isle of Man to you & I)
There is a map of current members here: https://www.conifa.org/en/members
Previous competitions had involved:
Presumably, like me, you have never heard of many of these, but it would be exhausting and boring to create a directory here. So try Wikipedia!