The Trophy for the Freedom of Peoples
On Wednesday 7 May, an unusual game of football took place at the Arena Civica di Milano – a historic stadium dating back to the Napoleonic regime, which used to host Milan and Inter games, and is now a municipal sports ground. Billed as an international game, the “Trophy for the Freedom of Peoples” was a friendly match held under the auspices of the New Federation Board for unrepresented nations.
This organisation, sometimes known as the “Non-Fifa Board”, is a body led by the famous former lawyer of Jean-Marc Bosman, which works with FIFA in the hope that it and its 22 members are merely in a temporary situation prior to some kind of full recognition.
The NF Board includes sides such as Wallonia and Chechnya, along with Monaco, Northern Cyprus, Occitania and the Romani nation in Europe. Further afield, there’s Somaliland, Zanzibar, West Papua, and Tibet. These are nations or peoples who for one reason or another are not represented and recognised by FIFA: either for political reasons (Chechnya, Northern Cyprus, Tibet) or for even thornier issues of definition – what constitutes a nation, in the case of the Roma people or of the Occitans?
Tibet’s status as a nation is less controversial, at least to most of the West. This week’s football game was an opportunity for Tibet to garner further attention and capitalise on the Olympic flame protests in a new sporting context, by playing… Padania.
Those readers who have wisely chosen to eschew the doomed and futile endeavour of trying to understand Italian politics may not know what Padania is. Padania is a politically-loaded term for northern Italy, in which a right-wing separatist movement called the Lega Nord (Northern League) sprang up in the 1990s. The Lega Nord are part of Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, Il Popolo della Libertà, and won an unprecedentedly high share of the vote in northern Italy in the April elections. Padania as a concept is one with little coherent geographical, political or historical basis, but the economic focus of the Lega has recently won them support; and they have a football federation, Padania Calcio, with a singularly rubbish website.
Lega Nord leaders Umberto Bossi and Roberto Maroni were present, along with crowds flying the green and white “Sun of the Alps” flag chosen as a Padanian symbol. Maroni commended that the match had been organised in a sign of “solidarity with the Tibetan struggle”, while Bossi spoke of his “hopes for a democratic solution to the situation” there. A small crowd of Tibetans, including a number of monks, waved national flags behind a banner proclaiming “Tibet Freedom Curva Sud”.
On to the actual football: Padania, wearing distinctly Celtic-like green and white hoops, won by a convincing 14-2 on the night. Well-known names were few and far between, perhaps the best known player being Maurizio Ganz, now 40 years old, who played up front for half of Italy: Samp, Brescia, Atalanta, Inter, Fiorentina, Modena, to mention just a few of his former teams, as well as Milan with whom he won a scudetto in 1999. Bologna legend Carlo Nervo, still playing in the lower leagues, played in midfield alongside former team-mate Fabian Valtolina, previously also of Venezia, Piacenza and Samp. The majority of the team were young amateurs or part-timers, playing in Serie C2 and D.
The Tibetan side were mostly made up, it appears, of students, exiles, whoever could be rounded up and encouraged to play – not the regular Tibetan national side after all. The ref was Paolo Silvio Mazzoleni, usually to be found directing Serie B games; he comes from Bergamo, a good solid Padanian city if ever there was one, with a solid 20% Lega Nord vote. The two sides will meet again in the Viva World Cup to be held in Sweden this summer; this was in some senses a classic pre-tournament friendly. Whether it represents the first step on the road to “freedom” for either side is another question.
Personally, seeing Padanian separatism endowed with some kind of moral equivalence to the Tibetan struggle for independence has left me open-mouthed: at the sheer cheek of the thing, if nothing else. On the other hand, raising awareness of the situation in Tibet and demonstrating support and solidarity is never a wasted gesture, so I shall try to keep a lid on my cynicism. Certainly, harnessing the idea of an independent Padania to that of an independent Tibet is a masterstroke of political spin-doctoring. And in a country where the name of the Prime Minister’s party is a football chant, what better way to do so than via the (not-so) beautiful game? The evening was a fine example of the role of politics in sport, and sport in politics, and the extent to which the two are intertwined in Italian culture.
Images courtesy Calcio blog
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You’ve done a typically good job at capturing the inherent weirdness of this entire exercise (though you’ve missed the way in which showing support for Tibet dovetails nicely with the China-bashing that fits both the xenophobic and anti-”Communist” elements of what passes for Lega ideology).
We considered going when the match was first announced, as it was free, the Arena is an interesting place to see just about anything, and ursus minor has never seen “national teams”, but the extent to which the entire event was geared towards glorification of the Senatur and his separatist nutters, as well as the absence of any kind of genuine Tibetan team, made that thought very fleeting.
Why do some people from Northern Italy want to become independent anyway?
The core argument is that “hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying” Northerners are subsidising “thieves” from the rest of the country, who “steal” the taxes paid by Northerners through a massively bloated public administration, patronage-driven handouts of all sorts, etc. The subtext that revolves around that claim (which is itself certainly subject to challenge) is often considerably more odious in its appeal to regional and racial prejudice.
Good read, and thanks ursus for the further info.
Any idea why Catalonia is not part of the Non-FIFA Board or the confederation of unaffiliated European teams?
I’m not certain, but think it may well be that Catalunya (and the Basque Country, Galicia, Valenciana, etc) have worked out a modus vivendi with the Spanish Federation that provides them with a modicum of recognition, allows them to play representative games (often around Christmas and Easter) and allows current Spanish internationals to turn out for their regional side (both Puyol and Xavi have played for Catalunya, for instance). The VIVA sides tend not to have been given anywhere near that degree of legitimacy by the “established authorities”.
Ursus as ever answers your questions better than I could. The North vs South issue comes back in part to the racism / regionalism issue we discussed here: http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2008/01/22/embedded-racism-in-italian-football/
Northern prejudice against Southerners can be pretty extreme – a Molisano friend of mine has been refused service in bars in Bolzano, purely on the basis of his accent.
So far as Catalunya goes, there is some information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia_national_football_team
Looking at the list of games they have played, and the way they view themselves, I wonder if they consider themselves to be “above” the VIVA world cup? or rather, further down the road to nationhood and thus not in need of the NF Board’s help, as Ursus says?
The list of sides affiliated neither to FIFA nor the Non-Fifa federation is huge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-national_representative_teams_in_men%27s_football
@ ursus
You’re right about the status of the Basque Country, who play friendly matches every year in the week before Christmas (St. Martin’s Day, I think). Catalonia played Brazil in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup.
Brittany also has a side that plays from time to time, the last being against Cameroon in Nanter in May 1998 but they’re lining up on Tuesday next against Congo (the former French colony, not DR Congo) in St. Brieuc. Players on the Breton selection include Milan’s Yohann Gourcuff and last season’s Ligue 1 top scorer Steve Savidian of Valenciennes.
Freedom for Galiza!!! We played Cameroon in Vigo last Christmas and got a draw…It doesn’t really matter to win or tolose when you represent/support your REAL country…and Galicia (nor Catalonia nor Basque Country) are NOT Spain..We have our own language, culture and differentiated history…A NATION IN OUR OWN RIGHT…GALIZA CEIVE! (That’s Galician for “Galicia Free”) and all the “galicias” of these world
I meant: Galicia and also Catalonia and the Basque Country are nations in their own right
EUSKADI!!!
Mailoc, ES719 et al… Unfortunately (4 u guys), Euskadi (sic), Galiza (sic), Catalunya (sic) are legally & politically part of Spain. Who are Puyol & Co. going to be playing football for this summer¿?¿ There you go… Sport & politics = Oil & water.
Catalunya and Castilla = Oil and Water
What is usually, this place included, ignored about the Padania movement is that despite its incoherent logic as to being a “people” it nonetheless catches a great deal of actual, real feelings a great deal of Northern Italians have about centralized government. Strip away the xenophobia and the inherent racism, which are alway easy scapegoats to disclaim any sort of argument, and what you are left with is an actual feeling of extreme disillusionment.
The fact that the entire argument about Italy’s status as a centralised country (rather than a a semi-federal [like Spain] or entirely federal [like Germany] state, which to a much larger degree captures the actually Italian national feeling, is constantly dismissed as irrelevant because of the Lega antics, actually is a main contributer to maintaining their momentum. As long as the serious issue of periphery-centrum cleavage line is not in some way mediated for in Italian politics, it will manifest itself in one way or another.
“Free Padania” is actually an extreme consequence of something which is a long-time coming.
RS, thanks for that point which I think is very interesting. Certainly you are right that a great many people share serious doubts about the centralized Italian state, both per se and as it currently functions. Some of these are in the North, some of them vote Lega Nord; plenty don’t vote for the Lega, and plenty are to be found in Central and Southern Italy and in the Islands.
My piece was obviously short on the political analysis since this is after all a football site, and whatever one things about the legitimacy of rejecting the Italian state in its current form, the comparison between Padania and Tibet is unarguable specious.
I suppose my problem with your argument is that I don’t see much evidence here of people having any greater faith in regional or provincial government; I would say it’s not simply anti-centrism but anti-government in more or less all its forms.
grande
Hi, i’m a padanian guy from bergamo, where lega nord have more than 30% of votes (1st party
Padania is not italy!
http://www.giovanipadani.leganord.org/argomentofed.asp?StringaDaCercare=English&Stringa=Federale
The Young Padanian Movement (MGP) is the political expression of the Lega Nord political party; but not only that.
Young Padanians are and represent every young person of the North, of Padania.
The Young Padanian Movement, in recent years, has been able to involve even young people not of the Lega Nord, or in general, with politics.
The MGP gathers together youngsters of all cultural and social extraction without ideological differences.
What really draws them together, is to search for and defend one great ideal: FREEDOM.
A belief that for Young Padanians is not just a word.
What does it really mean to be free? What is freedom?
We believe that freedom means the return to being master in our own home.
Freedom means being free to love our land with its mountains, its rivers, with its immense Plain and its fog!
It means being moved by the sight of the Mighty River Po, or by the notes of Verdi’s “Va Pensiero”.
It means valuing our traditions, our culture, our identity.
It means living untarnishable values of our lives.
It means being able to reap the fruits of our labours but not forgetting solidarity.
It means improving quality of life, creating new and more efficient infrastructures; defending our workers pensions; improving our children’s education.
It means having decent safe roads.
It means a serene retirement after a lifetime of work without tht nightmare of losing eagerly awaited
pension.
It means not living in degraded cities, where man is noy insignificant but a citizen.
It means to be free to form a family without the nightmare of the cost of living.
Do you onestly believe there is anything more noble than personal sacrifice in the name of freedom of one’s own people and land?
Not a selfish freedom but rela freedom, of our whole Nation!
This is the essence of the Young Padanians.
The giovani Padani expect the respect for our people, our history, our culture.
The Giovani Padani will always be in the frontline thus demonstrating one’s great love for the North, which has its name and identity: PADANIA.
And will soon has its FREEDOM!
BECAUSE THEY CAN DEPRIVE US OF LIFE,
BUT THEY CAN NEVER TAKE AWAY OUR FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
Very good written. I’ m loving reading these articles , it is such a rich topic, and a great chance for fans to share their knowledge & passion!
R.Vinello