Review of Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA Forgot

Greenland is an autonomous province of Denmark with a population of around 50,000. The Faroe Islands are an autonomous province of Denmark with a population of around 50,000. The Faroe Islands belong to FIFA; Greenland does not. A reasonable person might wonder why the Faroes are given membership into the international soccer governing body while Greenland is excluded. Such a reasonable person would not come up with anything resembling a reasonable answer. Greenland is one of the “countries” featured in Steve Menary’s new book Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA Forgot. The book is a whirlwind tour of forgotten lands scattered throughout the globe. During his visits with teams from places as diverse as Greenland, The Falklands, Northern Cyprus, Zanzibar, and Occitània, Menary introduces us to players, coaches, and officials struggling for international soccer recognition for their countries which, according to FIFA, don’t exist.

The Tibetan national team (photo: Kaos Pilot)

FIFA likes to promote the fact that it has more members than the UN. The international governing body of soccer got to its current level of 208 members (compared to 192 who belong to the UN) by various means, as Menary explains. Being the birthplace of soccer gives England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland separate teams. Chinese Taipei represents the island of Taiwan, and has since 1954 (the mainland Chinese team, like the country itself, was, for many years, an international pariah, and only joined FIFA in 1979). More recently, there has been a boom in FIFA membership, as some regional confederations with, as Menary dryly puts it, a “far looser idea of what constitutes a ‘nation’ than others” brought new members into the fold in a bid to boost their influence in the world governing body. CONCACAF has used this strategy most often, adding Arbua, the Turks & Caicos Island, and Anguilla among others to their ranks. Oceania boasts such powers as New Caledonia, Tahiti, and American Samoa. These three “countries” are not in fact independent. The first two are French territories, the latter an American possession. But they were let into FIFA in an earlier era. Today, becoming a new member of the club is a far more difficult proposition (only newly-independent countries such as Montenegro have achieved this goal in the past few years). But the fact that FIFA’s many non-independent nations have maintained their membership makes a mockery of the current argument that new members must be members of the international community (how exactly FIFA defined this is unclear, as Menary points out). Some of the teams have been rebuffed because they are technically parts of other countries that do have FIFA membership. In this category are Greenland, the Channel Islands, the Falklands, and Zanzibar, and the Sapmi people of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. For some countries, their entry into FIFA is too politically sensitive for the supposedly apolitical governing body to countenance. The national teams of Tibet, Northern Cyprus and Gibraltar have seen their progress hampered by larger countries with a political interest in the territories. When Greenland scheduled a match with Tibet, the Chinese government threatened to put an embargo on the Danish territory’s exports of shrimp to China. The match was called off. (In reality, FIFA is hardly apolitical. Menary describes their 1994 decision to give membership to Palestine as “a blatantly political act for a non-political organization.”) Then there are teams that Menary covers whose existence is an oddity at best. The Occitànian team is made up of speakers of the language of the same name, most of whom live in France, Spain, and Italy. The players who represent the Northern Marianas Islands, and whom Menary describes as “football missionaries” are mostly American expat “soccer dads.” In a game against neighbor Guam, the Northern Marianas team put out a team with a14 year-old and a teammate who, at 48 years old, could have been his grandfather. It’s easy to laugh off players and teams whose sole ambition is not to win, nor even qualify for the World Cup, but instead just to play in officially sanctioned matches. But all share the same dedication and work ethic as the players who lift the World Cup trophy every four years. Menary’s empathetic writing draws us into the world of Niklas Kreutzmann, Greenland’s captain and a dental student who would not let down his coach by missing a tournament that occurred just before his exams, and spent all his free time in between matches and training in his hotel room studying. Or Zanzibar goalkeeper Salum Ali Salum, who “has to be carried from the pitch crying uncontrollably” after his team loses a match in a penalty shootout. For these two players, as with nearly everyone Menary documents in Outcasts, the struggle to play international soccer is a task to which they have dedicated extraordinary effort.

Greenland (in red) and Zanzibar face off in the FIFI Wild Cup (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

The book is not without its faults. Many of the chapters were written as stand-alone pieces, and the book has a slightly pasted-together feel. And Menary’s decision to write about so many teams means that some of the more compelling stories are given short shrift. But overall, Outcasts is a wonderful addition to the increasingly homogenized diet of soccer writing being produced today. In an era in which so much soccer journalism simply repeats the latest result, transfer rumor, or Joey Barton arrest, the unique stories that Steve Menary writes about in Outcasts are a rare treat. Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA Forgot is published by Know the Score Books and is available from their website or Amazon.

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