/ 16 May 2008

A different kind of world cup

Football’s calendar in the coming two months appears to be quite hectic. Next month, Europe’s top countries will play in Euro 2008, which is being co-hosted by Austria and Switzerland, and in July there will be a football world cup — yes, a world cup for ”unrecognised nations”.

Last week, Tibet played Padania in a match in which their torch was snuffed out when they lost 13-2 to Padania — a province in the north of Italy that has ambitions of being a nation.

The match, attended by about 1 000 people and played at an old Roman amphitheatre in Milan, was free of charge and is a qualifier for the world cup of unrecognised nations to be played from July 7 to 13.

Officially known as the Viva World Cup, this is not a tourney for football-challenged nations, with which the southern part of Africa seems to be abundantly blessed. These are states or regions with secessionist ambitions — the status of which is under dispute — or simply regions that have hopes of being nations one day.

Cabinda in Angola, Biafra in Nigeria, the Basque or Catalan regions in Spain would all qualify, but they are not members. The first such tournament was played in Northern Cyprus in 2006. Predictably the tournament features the who’s who of countries that have made it into the media more for their politics than their football prowess.

These ”nations” are part of the New Federation (NF) Board that has 27 member ”countries”, including Chagos, Gozo (an island with about 30 000 people off the coast of Malta), Tibet, Kosovo, Gibraltar, Greenland. Zanzibar is the top-rated nation in the unrecognised nations league.

There is also Monaco, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland and Sami, also known as Lapps. This is not, strictly speaking, a nation, but a northern European tribe that is scattered across Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Russia. Sami’s most famous son, Morten Gamst Pedersen, plays for England’s Blackburn Rovers.

The league also includes Kurdistan, the Falkland Islands, Chechnya and Chagos — an island in the Indian Ocean that was cleared by the British to make way for a United States military base in the 1970s.

My money is on Padania winning the trophy. This is not because the Northern League, the party with parliamentary majority in the region, is a junior partner in the government led by Silvio Berlusconi, AC Milan’s owner. It’s because many of the Padanians used to be play in Italy’s professional leagues.