Steve Menary (photo: Play the Game)

How did you get the idea to write Outcasts?

I’m just a self-employed freelance journalist. There’s no career structure: you write an article and then you write another one and then you write another one and it goes on. I wrote an article about football in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and Jersey, and why they didn’t play international football. When I’d done that, I thought, “this is quite an interesting idea and no one’s ever written about this.”

Not everyone who applies to FIFA can get in or there would be the FA of David Keyes [ed note – not a bad idea!] and anyone could join. When I looked into it, they had turned some places down. FIFA would admit they turned someone down if I could find them out, but I asked them many times for a list of people who they’ve rejected and they would just ignore me.

I wrote a few chapters and I realized there were a few things like the Island Games … that I could go to and I could meet Greenland. They don’t even play in Greenland anyway and the flight there would have been about 1,000 pounds. The Falklands would have been about 2,000 pounds. But I realized I could go to the [2005 Island Games in the] Shetlands and I could see these people.

Shetland’s Steven Umphray during the Saaremma vs. Shetland match (photo: Shetland Islands Council / Steve Lindridge / www.idealimages.co.uk)

I sent it out to some big publishers and they said, “It’s very good, but we don’t know how much we’ll sell.” The publishers were okay, they gave me pretty encouraging rejections, if there is such a thing.

I knew David Conn and he said, “Why don’t you try to get in touch with World Soccer?”So I had a chat with [World Soccer’s] Gavin Hamilton and he said to me, “Come along, write something for us [on a non-FIFA “country”] each month.” World Soccer paid me fairly and he said, “If you get a book deal, don’t worry about [the rights]. It’s fine.” So that meant, for about a year, I could carry on researching the book. Each month I’d do an article [for the non-FIFA section] and I’d amass so much information, more than I could fit in a 500-word article. Then I found a smaller publisher after that, Know the Score.

Tell me more about the research you did for the book. Did you do it mostly at tournaments?

Yeah, I realized that the Greenland and the Falklands were good stories. I decided I was only going to do a chapter on a team if I could go see them play, meet with them in person, or have substantial dealings with them on the phone or by email. It’s very easy in this day and age to go on the Internet and cobble something together, but I just thought that was a cop-out. That was a quality control I set for myself.

I didn’t go to the Northern Marianas, which you probably guessed. The guys there, Vince [Stravino] and Peter [Coleman], were fantastically helpful. We exchanged a lot of calls and emails.

But I pretty much met [everyone else]. I went to the Island Games, I went to that tournament on the Isle of Man, I went to Gibraltar, I went to the Wild Cup in Hamburg, I went to the Occitania vs. Cyprus game, I took the whole family down to Montpellier. I went to a couple of NF Board meetings, one in London and one in the Hague.

Northern Cyprus and Zanzibar face off in the 2006 FIFI Wild Cup final (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

I went to the [2006 ELF Cup in] Northern Cyprus, which was a great bonus. They wanted to invite some journalists out there and they invited me and the guy who did the photographs for the book. That was great because the problem was the cost. I could have blown the advance I got for the book just going to the Falklands. You kind of had to have an imaginative way.

I also got some commissions. I did a thing for Guardian Unlimited about the Sami Cup. The great thing about that is that I’m in the journalist union and I was flipping through the magazine. There was a little ad in the bottom corner that caught my eye. It said that the Norwegian Embassy in London funds journalists’ trips to Norway. At the time I was thinking, “How am I going to get to Lapland? I’m never to be able to find another magazine to pay me to go up there.” I got in touch with a guy at the Norwegian Embassy and he said, “Right, when do you want to go?”

I had to make each thing pay. I wasn’t going to lose money going anywhere. It was more fun that way anyway.

Do you have an overall goal for the book?

I kind of wanted to try and look at how nationality is defined on the football pitch. I come from the UK and to most other places, it’s Great Britian. To us, we’re all English or Scottish or Welsh or from Northern Ireland. I live in a place that isn’t a country to the rest of the world, but it’s a country to us. In terms of football and rugby union, it’s a country.

I knew that I’d end up asking more questions than I answered. But I thought maybe it would just be a way of exploring it and writing something that will make people think in the way it made me think.

What are some of the questions you think you’ve asked?

I suppose, what is nationality? What is that, really? The Tibetian [player Karma Samdup] said: “It’s just a passport and you travel on that passport.” Or the Greenlanders. To them, [Greenland] is a place, [it’s] a country. It’s almost the same as the Faroes, who are in FIFA. There are certainly anomalies and there’s so much madness. It’s all about politics at the end of the day as much as anything else. There’s that idea that sport and politics shouldn’t mix. But clearly, they’re tightly intertwined.

Would you like to see the countries you profiled get into FIFA?

When I started telling people I was doing the book, they all kind of thought I was writing some kind of manifesto. I was never doing that. You couldn’t conceivably have the Falklands playing against Argentina even if [FIFA] let them in, which they never would. It would be ludicrous.

I think some of the places need more help than others. Certainly, Greenland deserves more sympathy than others because it’s been practically abandoned. They couldn’t go [to the Island Games last year] because they didn’t have the money to send the men’s and the women’s team and they thought it was about time the women got to go. They had played in every Island Games since 1989, but they had no money so they said, “Right, let’s let the women go” and [the men] stayed home. That seems madness really.

Greenland (in red) and Zanzibar face off in the 2006 FIFI Wild Cup (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

I don’t think they can all go in, but some of them, like Greenland and Gibraltar, they only want to play amateur football. They don’t want to play in the World Cup qualifiers; they don’t want to play in the Champions League. That was never really their ambition. I think they just wanted some help with the football they were organizing and they weren’t getting any.

Did you ever feel like you were ever covering teams that were too amateurish to warrant your covering them?

Some of the things with the NF Board were more about making a statement. A Lapland journalist, for example, told me that, in his opinion, a West Papuan team had no intention of ever turning up [to the 2006 Viva World Cup]. That was a bit amateurish.

And the Sami team that went out there murdered everyone because they had a lot of good players. They had people who had played international football at the under-21 level. So yeah, some of those teams, you feel, there’s got to be a real team, there’s got to be some basis to it rather than just a political stunt. Some of the teams didn’t have enough substance, but maybe if they got going long enough, they would have some substance.

Clearly, these teams aren’t going to win the World Cup. What, then, do you see as the value of your book?

They’re not going to win the World Cup, that’s true. But if you take some of the teams that are in FIFA, say Luxembourg. It’s 300,000 people, they’re not going to win the World Cup. I think they won a competitive match last year for the first time in 10 years. But they’ve been playing a long, long time. Luxembroug played in the early Olympic games. I think in the mid-1960s they knocked Holland out of the European Championships when it was a two-legged tie. Every dog has its day.

The nature of competition is that someone’s going to win and someone’s going to be last. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing golf or if you’re playing football. Someone’s got to be Arsenal and someone’s got to be Derby, and that’s just the nature of it. But you can’t go around and say, “Derby are really crap so let’s drop them” because maybe next year Derby will be better.

I think if you give people a chance, there’s a chance they’ll improve. I think if you cut them off, which is what’s been done to some of these places, then [the level of play] will just dissipate.

Who were some of the most interesting people you met while working on Outcasts?

I think some of the NF Board people. They’re very interesting. [President] Jean-Luc [Kit] is a very interesting guy. The Sami guy, Leif Isak Nilut, too, when he’s up on stage doing one of his yoiks.

President of the Sami FA, Leif Isak Nilut, in traditional clothing (photo: NRK.no)

And some of the Greenlandic people, too. It’s quite a harsh world out there. There are 15 kilometers of road in the capital and none of them go anywhere.

Probably the best thing about the book was that I met a lot of really interesting people and everyone was really interested in talking to [me]. That was one of the joys of doing the book. [I’d] ring someone up and they’d say, “Yeah, I’d love to speak to you.” The response from people was fantastic.

Do you see potential for change on FIFA’s part in terms of which countries they’ll let in?

UEFA have taken a reasonable stance and said, “You’ve got to be in the UN.” Whereas FIFA have just said, “You’ve got to be in the international community.” They don’t say what international community. It’s whatever international community they want it to be.

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

The connections between Croatia and Australia began in the 1850s during the Australian Gold Rush. The number of Croatians moving to Australia was small (not getting over 1,000 until after the turn of the century). The first Croatian soccer team in Australia was founded in 1945 by Marin Alagich.

A wave of Croatians who had been displaced by World War II came to Australia shortly after the fighting concluded. These new immigrants filled the ranks of Croatian teams, which multiplied throughout Australia’s major cities. Roy Hay, in his article ‘Those Bloody Croatians’: Croatian Soccer Teams, Ethnicity and Violence in Australia, 1950-99 has written of one ambitious club official. “Joe Radojevic, secretary of Geelong’s Croatia club in the 1950s, visited incoming ships in the company of a Slovenian priest to recruit Croatian soccer players, bringing around 350 to the club in his own estimation” (79).

The clubs grew and became integral parts of the Croatian communities in Australia (Hay claims they were initially more important than the local churches). The clubs took on great importance to community, standing for the Croatian state that many hoped would eventually become independent of Yugoslavia. Australian academic Philip Mosley has written:

More than any other ethnic group in Australia the Croats used soccer for political means. It was not just that they expressed their own nationalism. Plenty of other groups did so as well. What differentiated them was how pointed was their expression of nationalism. Convinced of perceived injustice, the Croats gave voice to their antagonism to Tito’s Yugoslavia … (35).

There was occasionally violence associated with Croatian soccer clubs and their fans. In 1972, a Croatian team was expelled from the Victorian Soccer Federation after numerous incidents of violence surrounding their matches. Matches against other ethnic Serbian teams were particularly charged. During the wars in the Balkans during the 1990s, matches between such teams had to be played behind closed doors.

Wray Vamplew has claimed that the violence was to “some extent … a product of the media, particularly the Australian press, which has focussed on crowd disturbances seeing them as newsworthy in the light of the European experience” (1). Accurate or not, the perception of violence among ethnic teams was such that teams with ethnic names were at one point not permitted to play in Australia’s professional league.

But more lasting than any violence is large number of players from the Croatian community who have reached the highest levels of Australian and international soccer. Australia’s former professional National Soccer League had two teams – Melbourne Knights and Sydney United – with strong connections to the Croatian community (neither features in the new A-League but do play in regional leagues as well as the annual Australian Croatia Soccer Tournament). The following players on Australia’s 2006 World Cup team had Croatian ancestry:

• Jason Culina (his father, Branko, is a coach and the entire family is featured on the Austrlian Migration Heritage Centre’s website)
• Tony Popovic
• Josip Skoko
• Mark Viduka
• Ante Covic
• Zeljko Kalac
• Mark Bresciano (his last name comes his Italian father, but his mother is Croatian)

The Australian national team (photo: Xinhua)

At the 2006 World Cup, Australia and Croatia played each other, drawing 2-2 in a first round match. The game is best remembered for Graham Poll giving Josip Simunic 3 yellow cards before sending him off. The English referee’s mistake has since become infamous, but perhaps Poll was confused about which country Simunic was really representing. After all, the defender was one of three Croatian players (along with Joe Didulica and Anthony Seric) born in Australia.

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.

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.

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.

What countries, I’ve wondered, could make up this elite group of non-UN, pro-FIFA members?

Well, it turns out most are officially territories of other countries. With the exception of the home countries, they are also low-ranking members of FIFA. So, while their impact on the sporting world may be minimal (with the exception of breaking records as in American Samoa’s 31-0 loss to Australia in 2001), they maintain status as icons of political and soccer trivia.

The full list:

Home Nations

• England
• Scotland
• Northern Ireland
• Wales

Countries Which are Officially Territories of Other Countries

• Puerto Rico (USA)
• American Samoa (USA)
• Guam (USA)
• U.S. Virgin Islands (USA)
• Macao (China)
• Hong Kong (China)
• Montserrat (UK)
• Bermuda (UK)
• British Virgin Islands (UK)
• Cayman Islands (UK)
• Turks and Caicos Islands (UK)
• New Caledonia (France)
• Faroe Islands (Denmark)
• Cook Islands (its foreign affairs are represented by New Zealand in the UN)
• Aruba (Netherlands)

Countries Whose Official Existence is Politically Sensitive

• Palestine
• Chinese Taipei (aka Taiwan)