Association Football’s Little League: “World Cup” Soccer in a Parallel Universe

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Politics, Sport

The premier tournament of world football, the quadrennial World Cup, is along with the Olympics the most publicised and prestigious international sporting event on the calendar. The powerhouses of the soccer World Cup, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France, Italy and Spain are household names in the world game, but the World Cup pedigree of the likes of Occitania, Sámpi, Padania, Abkhazia and Kurdistan is far less understood. And yet these geographical (and in some cases linguistic) entities have participated in their own football world cup – of sorts!

The VIVA World Cup
FIFA𝟙 is the international governing body which controls association football globally. For a raft of reasons football-playing territories like the above ones have zero prospects of ever joining FIFA (or UEFA𝟚). This has not stopped them from forming “national” soccer teams and organising ‘“friendly” games with fellow non-FIFA teams. These embryonic encounters on the pitch lead eventually to the formation in 2003 of a new para-FIFA body, Nouvelle Fédération Board (AKA N.F.-Board), to represent their interests. In 2006 the N.F.-Board had held its first (downsized) world cup for male players, known as the VIVA World Cup. The organisation of this event however exposed the fragile nature of this association of disparates. Originally VIVA 2006 was intended to be hosted by the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, but member-states fell out over planning and politics and the Board reassigned the holding rights to Occitania (a region linguistically defined and stretching over parts of Spain, France, Monaco and Italy). The organisation of the event, beset by various problems, did go ahead but with only three teams participating…Sámpi (representing the Sámi people of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia) routed Monaco 21–1 in the final.

Tibet v Abkhazia, 2018 World Cup (Photo: Sky Sports)

ConIFA World Cup
N.F.-Board organised several follow-up VIVA World Cups after the maiden event – three have been won by Padania (a would-be independent state in northern Italy proposed by regional separatists) and one by Kurdistan Region. The VIVA World Cup run out of steam however and was disbanded after the 2012 event. In 2013 a new body, ConIFA𝟛, succeeded N.F.-Board and the following year organised the inaugural ConIFA Cup – held in Sweden and won by Countea de Nissa (County of Nice) (France). Subsequent men’s cups have been won by Abkhazia (a partly-recognised breakaway “state” in South Caucasus) and Kárpátalja (representing a Hungarian minority in Carpathian Ruthenia). The 2020 ConIFA World Cup scheduled to be held in North Macedonia was cancelled owing to COVID 19, as was ConIFA Euro 22.

FA Sámpi Women (Source: ConIFA)

Women’s ConIFA Cup
The first women’s ConIFA cup, after a COVID-delayed false start in 2020, finally took place in July 2022. Tibet was the nominal host (though the tournament took place in India), and was only one of two sides to participate. The other “national” team, FA Sámpi, won the two games played and the cup in a woefully lopsided contest.

The non-FIFA world of international football
The host of soccer-playing entities affiliated with ConIFA derive from various categories of statehood or putative statehood. Some are legally and politically recognised entities, small sovereign states or micro-nations such as Kiribati, Federated States of Micronesia, Monaco and the Vatican City, or sub-national territories like Mayotte, Zanzibar and the Falklands Islands. Others are autonomous or autonomous-seeking regions, ethnic minorities and unrecognised states, including Western Sahara, Kurdistan, Somaliland, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Brittany, the Republic of Srpska (within Bosnia/Herzegovina), Northern Cyprus, the Channel Islands, the Romani (people) and even Esperanto (a football team representing the worldwide community of Esperanto speakers). The 2018 World Cup was located in London with the nominal host team, Barawa, representing the Somali diaspora in England. Minorities within states neglected and persecuted by the ruling ethnic/political majority are numbered within the association, eg, the Dafuri (Western Sudan), the Karen and the Rohingya (both from Myanmar).

Beyond football
For many of the players themselves the love of football is not the sole raison d’etre. Engaging in the sport collectively is a means to express their national identity denied to them through official channels, and to take pride in that identity. For the world’s many subsumed and marginalised entities an international football profile provides an opportunity to showcase and preserve their submerged heritages. The fielding of “national” teams on an international stage by the likes of Tibet and Abkhazia also draws attention to the plight of their prevailing political circumstance at the hands of more powerful regional neighbours. Diversity and inclusivity are key terms for ConIFA. The aspirations of it and its predecessor body N.F.-Board are to provide the world’s “underdogs” with a global platform through their football teams, ”a stage for the stateless” and recognition of their cause𝟜.

2018 ConIFA Cup final: Kárpátalja & Northern Cyprus (Photo: Kieran Galvin/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Footnote: ConIFA v FIFA
 FIFA has a checkered history especially of recent times including high profile charges of racketeering, fraud, corruption and conspiracy levelled against its highest office-holders. ConIFA by contrast is not FIFA in microcosmic form. ConIFA under president Swede Per-Anders Blind has been at pains to differentiate itself from the perception of FIFA’s pattern of “gravy train” indulgences, operating on a not-for-profit basis with all staff volunteers and an emphasis on transparency in its dealings. Not that everything has been rosy in the ConIFA garden…bickering between members have been a reoccurrence, Somaliland was forced to give up its hosting rights for (the ultimately cancelled) ConIFA 22 because of member opposition. The politically-eclectic nature of ConIFA has provoked ruptures within the association membership (eg, Northern Cyprus’s refusal to recognise Western Armenia).

FYI: That other men’s football cup takes place in November this year, to be controversially hosted by Qatar

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𝟙 Fedération Internationale de Football Association (who’s remit also extends to beach football and futsal)
𝟚 Union of European Football Assocations
𝟛 Confederation of Independent Football Assocations
𝟜 the New Yorker tagged the ConIFA Cup as the “the World Cup for Forgotten Nations”

Articles consulted:
‘From Abkhazia to Zanzibar: How CONIFA Are Uniting the World Through Football’, Will Sharp, The Magazine, 04-Jan-2018, www.thesefootballtimes.com
‘The Non-FIFA Renegades’, Steve Menary, Roads and Kingdoms, 07-Apr-2014, www.roadsandkingdoms.com

𓂀𝟙𝟚𝟛𓂀

Redeeming the Legacy of the Historic but Not-so-‘Honourable’ East India Company

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Inter-ethnic relations, Regional History
Source: American Numismatic Assn

The mention of the East India Company (EIC) evokes images of a Leviathan multinational corporation whose ruthless, monopolistic trading practices were conducted without moral scruples…for Indians the name recalls a colonial symbol of oppression and humiliation. The EIC had its origins as a English spices trading company in the East Indies in 1600. Over the following two centuries the EIC transformed itself into more than a gigantic business entity, becoming the de facto imperial ruler of a vast country containing some 20% of the global population. Between 1756 and the turn of the 19th century, the company, its authority and power buttressed by a private army numbering nearly 200,000 troops predominantly made up of Sepoys🄰, “swiftly subdued or directly seized an entire subcontinent” (William Dalrymple, The Anarchy, (2019)). Complementing the EIC’s military muscle used to threaten, destabilise and even depose local princes and moguls, control over the “empire” was aided by an elaborate and omnipresent network of spies.

Elite drug dealers
The company’s plunder of India in its relentless pursuit of profit extended to a prototype of large scale international drug dealing. Devoid of the slightest ethical misgiving the so-called “Honourable” East India Company created a monopoly over opium cultivation in Bengal…poppy farmers were forced into extremely onerous contractural arrangements to produce the opium which left them entrapped in an inescapable web of debt and impoverishment. The EIC then exported vast quantities of the narcotic to China🄱 in exchange for Chinese tea🄲 as well as porcelain and silks (‘How Britain’s opium trade impoverished Indians’, Soutik Biswas, BBC News, 05-Sep-2019, www.bbc.com).

Fringe benefits, accumulating a private fortune
In the 1850s Karl Marx summed up the EIC’s strategic focus: the company had “conquered India to make money out of it”. The company made a killing in India for its shareholders who had a big say in the company, but it’s overseas (especially executive) employees got in on the act as well, granted “the right to conduct private trade on their own account within Asia“ (in addition to their minimal salary) (Robins, Nick. “This Imperious Company.” The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, Pluto Press, 2012, pp. 19–40. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183pcr6.9. Accessed 7 Jul. 2022).

EIC excesses
A raft of corporate sins were perpetrated in India under the banner of the EIC—representing the pinnacle of shady mercantilism—–including corruption, bribery, extortion, human rights abuses (torture, slavery, etc), crony capitalism, officially sanctioned looting by British officials, economic exploitation of Indians and the subcontinent’s resources, impost of ruinous taxation. Company exploitation of Indian sepoys resulted in a mutiny of in 1857, the fallout of which was the dissolution of the EIC the following year, necessitating the British government to take over the running of the Indian empire itself (creation of the British Raj). Finally, in 1874 the EIC’s legal identity was terminated.

Reclaiming and rehabilitating the “Honourable” name of the East India Company
In 2010 the long-dormant EIC story took an unexpected and highly ironic twist – the East India Company—a name historically synonymous with colonial anathema for Indians—was relaunched in London by an Indian! Entrepreneur Sanjiv Mehta introduced a range of luxury consumer items (including 100 varieties of tea) onto the market. Mehta’s stated aim is to cast the company name in a new light, to associate it with “compassion, not aggression” as it’s history bears grim witness to. Aside from the business opportunity the Mumbai-born businessman described his move as a redemptive act, giving rise to an “indescribable feeling of owning a company that once owned us” (India), a turning of the tables on the erstwhile coloniser so to speak (‘The East India Company that Ruled Over Us for 100 Years is Now Owned by an Indian, Nishi Jain, MensXP, Upd. 02-Aug-2018, www.mensxp.com

Clive was widely satirised in England and disparaged under various nicknames, “The Madras Tyrant”, “Lord Vulture”, etc (British Museum)

Footnote: Clive of India: From war hero to the most vilified man in India
the 1600 royal charter granted the EIC “the right to wage war”, initially to protect itself and fight rival traders, but by the 1750s it was being used undisguisedly for aggression territorial expansion…in 1757 the company army under Robert Clive seized control of the entire Mughal state of Bengal, a precursor to other takeovers by force in India. Clive who started with the company as a humble writer (ie, clerk) made himself governor of Bengal and enriched himself and the company from stolen Indian treasure (jewels of gold, diamonds, precious textiles). The grotesquely-corrupt nabob Clive returned to Britain with a personal fortune valued at a princely £234,000 (‘The East India Company: the original corporate raiders’, William Dalrymple, The Guardian, 04-Mar-2015, www.amp.theguardian.com).

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🄰 colonial Indian soldiers
🄱 having hooked millions of Chinese on the drug
🄲 which rapidly became the British drink of choice