Steve Menary’s book Outcasts!: The Lands That FIFA Forgot is a fascinating read. In the book, Menary reports on the far flung “countries” that FIFA doesn’t recognize. Steve Menary sat down to speak with me recently about writing Outcasts and the issues his book raises. Menary told me that he got his start writing for several magazines, including World Soccer, When Saturday Comes, and Sport Business before he wrote Outcasts, his first book.

Steve Menary (photo: Play the Game)

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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)

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People of Croatian ancestry make up less than one-half of one percent of the population. But the influence of this small Balkan country on soccer in the land of Oz has far exceeded their numbers. Of the 23 players on Australia’s 2006 World Cup squad, 7 had Croatian heritage. Croatia’s team had 3 Australian-born players.

Croatian-Australian Mark Viduka (photo: Getty Images/ABC)

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I remember being surprised when I first read that soccer cleats (that’s American for boots) are commonly made from kangaroo leather. I was browsing through a soccer products catalog and came across the description. With a child’s naivete (I was probably 10 or so at the time), I assumed that this “kangaroo leather” couldn’t actually be made from those cute Australian animals. I was wrong, of course. Many high-level cleats today are made from the pelts of those adorable marsupials.

Soon to be seen on David Beckham’s feet

The first recorded pair of football boots came when Henry VIII of England ordered a pair from the Great Wardrobe in 1526. The royal shopping list for footwear states: “45 velvet pairs and 1 leather pair for football.” At that time, boots were made from cowhide.Throughout the early development of soccer, cowhide continued to be used to make cleats. The large bovine population in the UK, where soccer was codified, led to the wide adoption of cowhide to make boots. This material was also well suited to players’ requirements at the time, which were more about self-protection, rather than improving touch on the ball. The Wikipedia article on football boots says that they “were originally heavy boots with protection for the ankle, and these remained the standard style of boot in northern Europe for many years where the boots needed to stand up to the rigours of use on muddy winter pitches.”

An old school football boot, likely made of cowhide

But as soccer spread to areas with different climates, a new type of boots came to be used. “A lighter boot without ankle protection and resembling a studded shoe became popular in southern Europe and South America where pitches were generally harder and less muddy and this eventually became the standard style.”

The Puma Super Atom, the first screw-in boot

In addition to making the switch from hi-tops to low-tops, European and South American practitioners of soccer brought about a style of play that valued touch on the ball. As anyone who has used a pair of boots made from cowhide can attest, the material is relatively stiff. To advance the game, new materials were needed.

One material stood out among the various options. It was kangaroo leather, a material whose properties had been recognized since the 19th century, as former British citizens settled en masse in Oz. That Australia stayed a member of the Commonwealth even after independence in 1901 meant that trading connections with the UK remained strong. Australia has been a relatively small contributor to the world game in terms of players, but in terms of materials, its exportation of kangaroo leather fundamentally changed the production of footwear.

Kangaroo leather caught on because it is light, strong, and soft. According to the website Soccer-Boots.com:

Kangaroo hide is the toughest and most durable available and been used to produce quality sports shoes for rugby, American football, baseball, basketball, tennis and cycling shoes for over a century. It is lightweight yet very strong and many times stronger than the same thickness of cowhide. Comfortable and supple it requires no break-in period and gives the player a tight fit with optimal feel for the ball.

There is a scientific rationale for why kangaroo leather has these properties:

The skin of the Kangaroo does not contain sweat glands or erector pili muscles, which would weaken the skin surface. The yellow elastic fibres (elastin) are evenly distributed throughout the skin thickness which gives the leather greater tenacity.

Soccer-boots.com quotes a study that found “kangaroo leather retains between 30% and 60% of its original tensile strength, as compared to a retention rate of 1% -4% for calf and bovine leathers.”

Lotto Stadios, my favorite kangaroo leather cleats

As kangaroo leather has become more and more common in soccer cleats (see this list for some of the most well known ones), some complaints have been raised. Most vociferous is the group Viva!, (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals) which fills its website with complaints that focus primarily on inhumane treatment of kangaroos and the impact that widespread killing of the indigenous Australian animals has on the ecology.

A Viva! protest

Viva! claims that kangaroo harvesters routinely ignore government guidelines on humane killing of the animals. They say, for example, that a “million “joeys” die – battered to death or left to starve when their mothers are killed.”

The large numbers of adult and baby kangaroos killed (Viva! says that, at a minimum, 100,000 kangaroos were killed to make the 500,000 pairs of Predator Mania boots that Adidas sold in 2002) are also an ecological problem. Viva! claims that the so-called kangaroo harvest undertaken to reduce overpopulation is simply an excuse for companies to kill the animals for profit. The effects of reduced kangaroo populations, which are well adapted to the Australian environment, are not completely understood.

Hilariously, an article in The Independent on Viva!’s efforts finishes with a recipe for sauteed kangaroo. It reminds me of this t-shirt I once saw in the butcher’s department of a grocery store.

Viva!, not surprisingly, promotes the use of synthetic materials to make soccer cleats. Until recently, this would have been unthinkable, but several boots have been produced with man-made materials (see, for example, the Nike Mercurial Vapors)

The Danish company Hummel has gone a bit retro in their use of materials. Rather than using synthetics, they have been promoting a new boot that uses goatskin leather.

Hummel’s 4.2 Concept FGC, made of goatskin

One advantage these shoes have is that ten year olds like me won’t wonder if they are really made of hopping marsupials. There is also the benefit that animal rights organizations are unlikely to raise a stink over the use of goatskins in soccer cleats (the cuteness equation goes: goats < kangaroos). Whether they succeed, however, will ultimately depend on their quality. If goatskin can be used to make boots as high-quality as those available today, they may be become commonplace. If not, expect to see kangaroo leather boots for a long time to come.

Soccer is played all around the world, but the world’s people have many ways of referring to the game. Soccer is played by the same rules throughout the world, but is referred to as football, fútbol, futebol, calcio, fussball, voetbal, sakka, among other names.

The original name given to the sport is the most logical: football. Though the term has a Neanderthalish tinge to it (“Me Tarzan. My foot kick ball.”), football has been used to refer to the game for centuries. In his book The Ball is Round, David Goldblatt quotes an edict issued in 1477 by British king Edward IV:

No person shall practise any unlawful games such as dice, quoits, football, and such games. (17)

Edward IV, football hater

By the time formal rules were established for the game in the 19th century, the term football had a long history in Britain. Its application to the newly formalized sport was natural. The split with the sport which would become rugby in the middle of the 19th century saw the sport of the oval ball game take a name from the town in which its rules were formed. The town of Rugby is now known more for the sport invented within it than its status as the birthplace of Norman Lockyer, who would go on to discover the element helium.

Football’s rise in popularity came at a time when the British Empire was at its peak. The sun never set on the British Empire and neither did its football-playing subjects. As Brits moved around the world, they were the greatest advocates of the new game, spreading the word more effectively than any religious evangelicals.

In many countries, the term “football” was taken directly from the English and used as a loanword in the native language. Thus, the French, Italians, Germans, Argentines, and Brazilians all initially awkwardly used the term football to refer to this new British sporting import. Many have concocted new names but ironically the French, notoriously prickly on matters of language, still refer to the sport as “football.”

The French Football Federation logo

Many countries would transliterate the name football into their own languages. Football became fútbol in Spanish and futebol in Portuguese. Though these terms have essentially become part of those two languages, they still strike me as a bit odd at times. Some in these countries also saw these transliterations as odd and attempted to use native words to refer to football. The full name of Spain’s Real Betis, for example, is Real Betis Balompie, Balompie is the literal translation (balón being ball and pie being foot) of football, but rarely used today.

Other countries were more successful in having native words stick to refer to football. Both German (fussball or fußball) and Dutch (voetbal) use the literal translation approach that proved unsuccessful in Spain.

The Italian term for football, however, is calcio, which bears no resemblance to the English word. Calcio literally means kick in Italian, but the name comes originally from an ancient game played in Italy during medieval times. The game, called Calcio Fiorentino as it was played in Florence, involved 27 players per team using hands, feet and utter brutality (click here for a video) to propel a ball into the opposing team’s goal.

Calcio Fiorentino is reenacted annually, as in this picture

Calcio’s application to modern football was an intentionally ideological decision. When football was brought into Italy by the British, it was met with some resistance. As David Goldblatt points out,

The earnest cadres of the Socialist Party’s youth wing spent their 1910 congress decrying modern competitive sport as a degrading and exploitative spectacles that was contributing to the degeneration of people. (151)

If football was degrading and exploitative, the many Italians who took it didn’t seem to mind. Football’s growing popularity meant that opposing it on ideological grounds was no longer feasible. So, in what Goldblatt describes as a “symbolic victory based on an invented history,” (154) the Italians renamed football calcio, implying a (nonexistent) link between their ancient sport and the new game.

As a young child, I remember asking my parents why we called a sport involving catching and throwing a ball football when surely soccer deserved the name. In the United States, football refers to American football, a spinoff of rugby, a sport which grew widely in this country before soccer did. Thus, with the term football already in use, organizers used a shortened version of Association Football (the full name of the sport) to refer to soccer.

Soccer, American style

There are a few countries that also use the term soccer, including Australia (in order to avoid conflict with its own Australian Rules football) and New Zealand (I assume the Kiwis simply use the same term as their larger island neighbors).

Surprisingly, Japan also uses the term soccer, or more precisely sakka (???? in Japanese). Like Spanish and Portuguese speakers who had earlier made football a part of their own languages, the Japanese also transliterated a foreign word into their own language.

Sakka a la J League

The name the Japanese use to refer to the sport has to due with historical circumstance. Though soccer had been played for decades in Japan, it only became prominent on the sports scene in the country in the second half of the 20th century. At this time, the sun had long set on the British Empire, but a new American Empire has risen to replace it. Thus, although the national organization is called the Japanese Football Association, the Japanese people have chosen an American term to refer to the sport.

FIFA is divided into 6 confederations (well, 5 and a half now that Australia has left Oceania), each representing a region of the world. They are: AFC (Asia), CAF (Africa), CONCACAF (North and Central America and Caribbean), CONMEBOL (South America), OFC (Oceania), and UEFA (Europe).

Most of the member countries of each confederation are based on geography, with a few exceptions. Most of these anomalies are of fairly inconsequential teams, at least in terms of soccer pedigree. Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana are members of CONCACAF despite being firmly placed in South America, Kazakhstan (very nice!) recently “moved” from Asia to Europe (presumably in order to suffer more humiliating losses than it had previously), while Australia grew tired of beating up on American Samoa, Vanuatu, and the like and left Oceania to join Asia.

But the most interesting geographic anomaly in the world has to be Israel. Despite being located in the heart of the Middle East (and how could you forget that today?), Israel is a member of UEFA. While FIFA strives to be apolitical, it is often the case that the soccer governing body’s work is reflected by and even shapes the politics of the day. How else can a country that borders countries that are all members of the Asian confederation be considered European?

The answer is simple to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Middle Eastern politics. Israel is the only Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world. At a time of great conflict in that region, soccer games between Israel and most of its neighbors would have the potential to cause serious problems.

Religious and ethnic conflict have blighted the history of the Middle East for thousands of years and have grown even more intense since Israel’s founding. With several wars, an occupation, and enough vitriol spewed on both sides to fill the Dead Sea, relations between Jews and Arabs are not, let’s say, genial.

So perhaps it is a bit of a surprise that it was only as recently as 1994 that Israel was fully inducted into UEFA. But which confederation hosted Israel prior to this? Well, it turns out the Israeli national team is nearly as nomadic as the Jews themselves.

The current Israeli Football Association was founded in 1928 as the “Palestine Football Association.” Its first official international match was a 7-1 drubbing at the hands of Egypt (click here for a complete list of Israel’s international matches). At this time, Israel / Palestine was a member of the Asian confederation and (unsuccessfully) attempted to qualify for the 1934 World Cup against Asian opponents Egypt, Greece, and Lebanon.

After the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the newly renamed team played its first match against none other than the United States (a 3-1 loss in a game played in New York). The opponent was not a surprise, as the Americans were the first country to recognize the newly created state.

During the 1950, 1954, 1958, 1960, and 1966 World Cup qualifying cycles, Israel competed in Europe, never making it to the finals. However, at the same time Israel competed in Asia for Olympic qualifying matches and in regional competitions. Despite being situated in the Western part of the Asian confederation geographically, Israel was placed in qualifying groups with mostly East Asian teams. The intent was obvious: to avoid fixtures that might spark conflict.

But politically sensitive placement could not achieve the goal of avoiding match-ups between Israel and its rivals. On several occasions at the Asian Nations Cup, Israel was drawn against countries with whom they shared a high degree of enmity. It seems amazing today, but in 1968 Israel went to Iran, losing 2-1 to the hosts in the semi-finals.

Soon after, teams began to refuse to play Israel. In 1974, North Korea (huh?) and Kuwait refused to play their matches and Israel won by forfeit (interestingly, Iran — pre-Islamic revolution, of course — took on Israel and again won, this time 1-0).

Israel went through World Cup qualifying in 1970 as a member of the even more geographically remote Oceania region, this time making it to the finals of the tournament, their only ever appearance. In 1974 and 1978, Israel returned to Asian qualification, though against East Asian opponents as before. 1982, it was back to Europe. 1986 and 1990, Oceania again. Since 1990, Israel has attempted to qualify for the World Cup from Europe and it seems likely they will remain here in the future.

Israel’s soccer nomadism is not self-imposed; it has been forced to globe trot looking for a home nearly since its founding. The geographically natural place for Israel to play is Asia, but the idea of Israel playing away in Tehran, Damascus, or Riyadh today is nearly inconceivable. Indeed, Israel’s neighbors refused to play against the Jewish country, thus leading to Israel’s expulsion from the Asian confederation. After being kicked out of Asia in the early 1970s, Israel remained unaffiliated for over 20 years.

It is sad but true that politics weasels its way into soccer despite the best efforts of FIFA and others to keep them separate. Having Israel play in Europe to avoid conflict surrounding matches against their enemies is the most sensible solution for now. But one can only hope, foolish as such hope might seem today, that future peace in the Middle East might be solidified by games between Israel and its neighbors.