The outcasts are on the world stage again: the third Viva World Cup, for associations unaffiliated with FIFA, got underway this week. It’s being held in the northern Italian cities of Verona, Brescia and Varese.  You might remember our post on the 2008 Viva World Cup hosted by Sápmi in Gällivare, Sweden won by Padania and featuring five teams.

This was an improvement on the three who actually made it to participate in the inaugural 2006 Viva World Cup in Occitania, out of the six originally scheduled due to a conflict with the original intended host in Northern Cyprus (who eventually organised the ELF Cup to compete with the VWC).

Originally planned to be played every two years, the success of the 2008 competition in raising awareness of the wannabe nations — the main purpose of the event — has encouraged the organisers, the N.F.-Board (New Football Federations-Board) to hold it every year.

The N.F.-Board, headquartered in Liege, Belgium, currently has 18 full members, and a number of associate and provisional members, stretching from the Chechen Republic to Easter Island. The N.F.-Board states that its purpose is to be a “transitional” body for Football Associations looking to gain FIFA recognition. Its admission rules are simple: “Any Football Association which represents a People, a Nation, a Minority or an Isolated Territory population may become an Affiliated member of NFB.”

Six teams have entered the tournament this year, though one of the strongest non-FIFA teams, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, is again in dispute with the NF-Board and is sitting out for political reasons because of the participation of Iraqi Kurdistan, according to Steve Menary (author of the book Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA forgot).

This year’s entrants, a decidedly mixed bag in terms of nationhood legitimacy and footballing ability, are divided into two groups, as follows:

Group A

Padania
The hosts of the tournament, Padania is an alternative name for northern Italy and one adopted and popularised by the Lega Nord party since the 1990s as a proposed name for a breakaway northern Italian state.

Lega Nord has helped the organisation of a Padanian team since 1998.  They have been one of the more successful non-FIFA teams, winning all five of their matches in their inaugural appearance in the 2008 Viva World Cup. Two Italian Serie D players, Stefano Salandra and Giordan Ligarotti, finished as top scorers.

Padania 2-1 NK Zagabria

Iraqi Kurdistan
Iraqi Kurdistan is an autonomous federal region of Iraq, bordering Turkey, Iran and Syria.  Football in Kurdistan has progressed considerably since the end of Saddam’s regime. Some players, such as former captain Karwan Salih, have played for both the Iraqi national team and the Iraqi Kurdistan team. Kurdistan will be making their second appearance in the Viva World Cup, after failing to work out admission with the N.F.-Board to the 2006 tournament, and finishing fourth in 2008, winning only one of five games.

For the 2009 tournament, most of the players come from the Kurdistan league, which ended its first season of play last month. The league was founded this year after complaints that Kurdistan teams were treated poorly in the nationwide Iraqi league. Iraqi Kurdistan was granted full membership of the N.F.-Board in December 2008, and will host the VIVA World Cup in 2011.

Kurdistan Flag

Occitania
Occitan is a traditional language in much of the southern half of France and parts of Italy and Spain, and Occitania is the name that has been given to the cultural region. The team was established in 2004 by the Associacion Occitana de Fotbòl, founded itself over a century ago.

Occitania took third place in the first Viva World Cup in 2006. In 2008, they decided to participate in the Europeada instead of the VWC, a tournament for national minorities in Europe, where they reached the quarter-final. Their most recent game, against Monaco last November, ended in a 2-2 draw.

Linguistic map of Occitania

Group B

Sápmi
You might know Samiland better by the name Lapland, home to the indigenous Sápmi people, numbering around 60,000 up in the Arctic Circle.

Organised by the Sápmi Football Association, the Sápmi team won the 2006 Viva World Cup (scoring 42 goals in three games!), and hosted the 2008 event, where they disappointingly finished third. They joined the NF-Board in 2003.  Most Sápmi footballers play in Norway and a few in Sweden. Some well known Sápmi footballers have played for FIFA recognised Scandinavian countries, including Morten Gamst Pedersen for Norway.

Sápmi

Provence
Provence, a region in the southeast of France, are one of the most recent affiliates of the NF-Board, joining in December 2008.

They competed at the 2008 Viva World Cup, the region’s first representative games since 1921, managing to lose all  four of their  games. So far, they have just one win, beating Monaco last December 3-2, suggesting they might have turned a corner.

Provence

Gozo
Perhaps the most obscure of the entrants, Gozo — the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago, with a population of 31,000 — are making their Viva World Cup debut. Gozo has been governed by Malta throughout its history, apart from a brief period of autonomy granted by Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century. It’s supposedly the island that Odysseus was imprisoned on for seven years as Calypso’s “prisoner of love” in Homer’s Odyssey.

The Gozo Football Association was founded in 1936, and runs a league with two divisions along with several cup competitions. The Gozo F.A.  is a provisional member of the NF-Board. A team run by the F.A., Gozo F.C., competes in the Maltese league second divison, playing at the 4,000 capacity Gozo Stadium. Most of Gozo’s players in the Viva World Cup have played for Gozo F.C.

Gozo Football Association

Update: Since I started writing this entry two days ago, several games have taken place in the tournament. On day one, Padania defeated Occitania 1-0 in Group A and Provence beat Gozo 3-1 in Group B.  On day two, Kurdistan beat Occitania 4-0 in Group A and Sápmi lost 2-1 to Provence. For all the latest results, visit the Non-Fifa Football World blog. I’ll keep this page updated as results come in, and the competitive scores so far suggest progress in the world of non-Fifa associations.

Padania have won the second Viva World Cup, for non-Fifa affiliated nations, beating the Aramean Syriac side 2-0 in the final yesterday. The goals came from midfielders Alberto Colombo, who plays for Serie D side Merate, and Giordan Ligarotti, from Este who play in the Eccellenza regional leagues.

Organised by the Nouvelle Fédération Board (NFB), the tournament involved just 5 sides: alongside the eventual finalists were Provence, Kurdistan and the hosts, the Sápmi, representing the Sami people who occupy parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, and who had won the inaugural Viva World Cup in 2006. For a variety of reasons – logistic, political, footballing – many other teams involved either in the 2006 edition or in other NFB games chose not to take part: Occitania, Tibet, Zanzibar, Greenland and Northern Cyprus, to name but a few.

Padania waltzed to glory with comfort, winning their group stage games 6-1, 2-1, 2-0 and 4-1. And Lega Nord leader and founder Umberto Bossi, taking time out from the minor task of being Minister for Institutional Reforms, was there to cheer on his team’s victory. What it means when a government minister of one country claims to identify with the national team of another, albeit unrecognised, nation is a mystery… Anyway, Bossi made his way onto the pitch at the end to celebrate with the players and the 40 or 50 Padania fans who had made the long trip to what we’re not supposed to call Lapland.

The NFB are hopeful that the competition will continue to grow in strength and status, so perhaps a wealthy, first-world victor is no bad thing from their perspective, if it raises the profile of the competition. As for the quality of the actual football, that’s anybody’s guess: I can’t find a proper match report anywhere. But then it’s a competition where symbolism is more important than goals.

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