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

The Architectural Folly of Portmeirion: Faux Italian Riviera on the North Wales Coast

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Built Environment, Cinema, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

Gobeithio y gwnewch chi fwynhau eich arhosiad yma.

“We hope you have a pleasant stay in Portmeirion.”

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Image: nytimes.com

British architect Sir (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis spent half a century (1925 to 1976) on a pet construction and town planning project in the Snowdonia region of North Wales, handcrafting his ideal of a village from scratch. The eccentric, autodidactic architect with a penchant for wearing knickerbockers called his back country village “Portmeirion”, drawing inspiration for his Welsh labour of love from the Italian Riviera fishing village of Portofino. What Williams-Ellis created was a scaled-down village comprising a picturesque patch-quilt of individual buildings built primarily for decoration, known in the architectural business as follies.

Photo: Pinterest / M Serigrapher

Piecing together the mosaic
Architecturally, Portmeirion is “an eclectic pastiche” (Gruffudd 1965) with stylistic borrowings from Gaudi, the Mediterranean and the Italian Renaissance, from the Arts and Crafts Movement and from Nordic Classicism et al, juxtaposed and intertwined together. Trompe l’oeil windows, Baroque murals, gargoyles, inverted copper cauldron, Classical details, all contributing to a quirky, multi-coloured panorama of buildings with a Mediterranean feel – in North Wales. Williams-Ellis sourced materials from disused estates and ruined castles across the UK for the village. (“Portmeirion Village: Fifty Years Since The Welsh Resort Starred In TV’s Iconic ‘The Prisoner’”, John Oseid, Forbes, 22-Mar-2017, www.forbes.com). Williams-Ellis’s use of salvaged fragments led him to describe his creation as “a home for fallen buildings”.

Portmeirion’s creator (Source: Portmeirion Village)

Reconciling structures with landscape
Williams-Ellis was a champion of preserving rural life, inspiring a Welsh movement, CPRW, guardians of Cymru Wledig…his philosophy applied to architecture was that “the development of a naturally beautiful site need not lead to its defilement”, new buildings, done well, could enhance the landscape (‘Portmeirion: A Passion for Landscape and Buildings’, Rachel Hunt, Gwanwyn, Spring 2018, cprw.org.uk). For the site of his cherished Italianate village William-Ellis choose a “neglected wilderness” which had formerly been part of the Aber Iâ① estate. Over the years the constituent parts of the village took shape – the Citadel (an Italianate campanile (bell tower)), Battery Square, Village Green, Gothic pavilion, Bristol Colonnade, blue-domed Pantheon and statue of Hercules, Italianate landscaped gardens. The Victorian manor from the old estate was transformed into the village hotel. The plan had been to incorporate a 19th century castle, Castell Deudraeth (named after an extinct 12th century castle in the locale), but this didn’t happen in Clough’s lifetime. Since 2001 the castellated building has functioned as a hotel for Portmeirion tourists.

Source: wheretogowithkids.co.uk

Academic architecture hasn’t rated Portmeirion highly, tending to dismiss it as an “idiosyncratic playground of little interest”, a mere “hodge-podge” of differing styles (Manosalva, M.A., 2021. One-man-band: Clough Williams-Ellis’ Architectural Ensemble at Portmeirion. ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, 6(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ajar.268). Not that this in any way deflected Williams-Ellis from single-mindedly pursuing his own peculiarly personal architectural vision of a “fantasy village”②… the architect freely admitted to taking what he described as “a light opera approach”, wanting to give people architecture that was pleasurable and fun to behold and enjoy.

‘The Prisoner’ being filmed on site (Source: radio times.com)

Sixties‘ TV spy culture augments the Village’s celebrity and tourism
While Portmeirion’s uniqueness guaranteed its fame and its standing as a niche holiday resort, its selection as the set for a cult 1960’s TV series magnified that fame exponentially. The Prisoner, a Sci-fi dystopian series, created by and starring Patrick McGoohan, was filmed in and around the village in 1966-67. The 17-episode series about a government agent who finds himself mysteriously transported to a beautiful, charming but bizarre community—where for inhabitants, imprisoned betwixt mountains and sea, there is no escape — a community impersonalised to the point where everyone is a number and no one knows who’s in charge. The Prisoner‘s enduring cult status has ensured a constant stream of loyal fans from far and near making the pilgrimage to Portmeirion each year (Covid permitting). The local tourist industry has done its bit to capitalise with a Prisoner souvenir shop, tours of the film locations, etc. The giant chessboard in the square which appeared in the TV show has been (permanently) reconstructed to further cash in on the series’ appeal.

Beatle George visits the Village – “fab!” (Source: North Wales Live)

Endnote: Enticing the rich and famous
A host of celebrities can be numbered among the endless throng of visitors to Portmeirion over the decades…GB Shaw, HG Wells, Bertram Russell, Frank Lloyd Wright③, Brian Epstein, George Harrison, to name but a few. Noel Coward wrote the first draft of his comic play Blithe Spirit during a stay at the seaside resort.

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① Welsh: “ice estuary”

② when his architectural “day job”, designing other people’s houses and buildings in various parts of the UK and Ireland allowed it

③ apparently FLW approved of the architecture of the place

The Beatles’ Pipe-dream Paradise: The Aborted Greek Island Venture

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Memorabilia, Music history, Popular Culture

In a 1966 double-A side single the Beatles sung “we all live in a yellow submarine” but in real life the Fab Four did want to live together on a secluded Greek island they intended to buy. It happened the following year, 1967, the boys were holidaying in the Greek islands and were island-hopping when they came upon an ideal island location. Or at least that was what George, John and Paul thought while on acid the whole time of the “inspection”{𝔸}. The island that their eyes lit on was roomy enough, some 80-acres with a fishing village, a large olive grove and four beaches. In addition to the main island there were four smaller islands surrounding it (one for each Beatle!)


The prime mover for the island home scheme was Beatle John. At that point in his life Lennon was edging his way into his glorious hippie phase. The Aegean “Arcadia” represented a chance to live communally, an idyllic place where he and the other three celebs could escape the overwhelming pressures and attentions of superstardom. The plan was for the four musicians and the group’s entourage (manager Epstein, the roadies and the inner circle of assistants plus relatives) to all live together on a huge estate on the island hideaway. Paul and George seemed to have been on-song with John at that hazily propitious moment in time…McCartney: (the island was the means of achieving) “a sort of hippie community…where nobody’d interfere with your lifestyle”…Harrison concurred: “we’ll buy the island, we’ll just go there and drop out” (‘The Beatles in Greece’, Daily Beatle,, 03-Jul-2014, www.wogew.blogspot.com).

Team Beatles hit Greece (Source: Greek City News)
What prompted such an extravagantly fanciful and surreal notion?
The short answer would appear simply to be drugs! Narcotic substances may have inspired the germ of the highly romantic and improbable idea. As Beatle Paul explained later, the boys saw in the island jewel a place where they could smoke pot unhindered, without fearing the consequences of the law. Paul attributed the island acquisition project to “drug-induced ambition”. Certainly drug consumption was part of the agenda in coming to Greece – if you accept the word of NEMS staffer Peter Brown. According to Brown, a Beatle associate Yannis Mardas (AKA “Magic Alex”) had brokered a deal with the Greek authorities giving the Fab Four the green light to bring personal supplies of drugs secreted in their carry-on bags into the country in return for photo ops in aid of Hellenic tourism (Daily Beatle).

The rich celebrity artists’ commune
Roadie (and later Apple Corps head) Neil Aspinall’s recollection of what John, Paul and George (but especially John) had in mind was a configuration of individual villas for the four Beatles which would all be linked to a central dome of some description. There would also be a recording studio on the main island, plus an entertainment complex and some “knock-up” housing for Beatle staff and visiting friends.

Trinity Is (Source: Culture Trip)

The decision to buy the island paradise was pretty much made on the spot and another NEMS assistant Alistair Taylor was sent back to London to seal the deal. This necessitated the boys buying £90,000 worth of special export dollars to complete the international transaction. But by the time the deal was set up, the Beatles’s initial enthusiasm had waned and they had changed their minds…or maybe they just forgot about the whole grand scheme. Taylor then had to sell the export dollars back to the Greek government, which resulted in an unexpected windfall for the group, courtesy of a favourable exchange rate for the UK£{𝔹}.

Trinity Is is commonly referred to as “guitar-shaped” but with such a profound bend in its “neck” it looks more like one of Pete Townshend’s well-thwacked Fender guitars
In the application to purchase document (held in the British National Archives) the name of the would-be Beatle island—described as “300,000 square metres of arable land, olive trees, beaches and rocks”—is given as “Aegos, Konstadinos”(?), however no such island can be identified among the multitude of Aegean offshore islands. Another name ascribed to the heavily-wooded island fancied by the Liverpudlian musos is “Leslo” which also unfortunately does not exist. The more likely candidate which most people favour is Trinity Island{ℂ}, located to the east of Athens and just off the larger Euboea Island in the Western Aegean ‘The Beatles visit a Greek island they intended to purchase’, The Beatles Bible, Updated 13-Sep-2021, www.beatlesbible.com .

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{𝔸} Ringo wasn’t on the real estate expedition, he bailed after the Greek mainland part of the trip to return to his Weybridge (Surrey) mansion

{𝔹} a profit of £11,400 was forthcoming for the band

{ℂ} sometimes erroneously called Agia Triada (“Holy Trinity” island)

Beatles Not For Sale: Public Enemy # 1 in the Philippines

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Memorabilia, Music history, Popular Culture

1966 was indeed a watershed year for the world’s most popular band the Beatles. It was the year that at its end the fabled foursome called it quits on overseas touring and live performances. This followed a demanding 12 months of touring, including Germany, Japan, the Philippines and America (the third visit but this time as reluctant tourers). The constant grind, the heavy work load, the culmination of five years of more or less nonstop touring, had left the group exhausted.

Nihonjin cultural lesson for Ringo & John (Source: nippon.com)

This was only one factor in the ultimate decision to pull the plug…increasing dissatisfaction with sound quality at the various venues they played contributed as well as fears about their personal security and safety on tour1⃞ which escalated after John Lennon’s controversial comments about the Beatles being “more popular than Jesus Christ” and his stated prediction that Christianity will wither away.

Fateful words of the leader
John’s spontaneous act of hubris had profound ramifications as the year unfolded. On the “reunion” visit back to Hamburg, Germany, the Beatles received a death threat. In Japan though fans at concerts were rapturous, Japanese traditionalists voiced opposition to them, and were incensed that the Beatles’ gigs were held at the Nippon Budekan, a Japanese shrine for the war dead. But this was all mere turbulence compared to the tsunami greeting them in Manila, the Philippines’ capital. Moments after the boys stepped foot on the tarmac they were separated from manager Epstein and abruptly whisked away by military types to visit some local plutocrat VIP they didn’t know. The two concerts scheduled for the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium for that day (before a Beatle record combined audience of 80,000) though went exceedingly well.

The Marcoses in 1966 (with an American “friend”) (Photo: Yoichi Yokamoto/National Archives)

“Enemies of the state” snubbing the First Family
What brought the tour undone and turned it into a nightmare for the Beatles was Epstein’s declining an invitation for the boys to attend a brunch reception at the presidential palace organised by “First Lady” Imelda Marcos 2⃞. After the no-show by the Fab Four things turned ugly. The Philippine media castigated the Beatles for their grievous insult to the Marcos family, whipping up an instant public frenzy of Beatlephobia in the country.

Manhandling the teen icons

Beatles Alis Dayan!3⃞
All the chickens came home to roost the next day when the Beatles and their entourage tried to leave the country. First, the local promoter refused to pay the group for their performances, then they weren’t allowed to leave the hotel until Epstein coughed up nearly 75,000 pesos in taxes on the performance fees they were never paid! Meanwhile bomb and death threats against the Beatles were phoned in. But it was when they got to the airport that Filipino vengeance displayed its real venom. The Beatles found their protection had disappeared and the airport refused to handle their baggage and gear, forcing them to carry their own luggage (and their roadies to lug all the equipment themselves) to the plane. As they struggling to make their way to the plane, guns were brandished and the entourage was jostled and attacked by thugs (Mal Evans copped a beating, Epstein was hit, even Ringo got clocked with an flailing uppercut!). They were seen off into the aircraft with an equally hostile reception from hundreds of irate Filipinos wishing them good riddance!

But that wasn’t the end of the ordeal for the Beatles and their minders. The authorities suddenly discovered that some of the group’s flight paperwork was awry and roadie Mal and press officer Tony Barrow were forced to leave the safety of the Beatles’ KLM plane and return to the terminal to make amends. So the Beatles’ jet sat idly on the tarmac for another 40 minutes before it was finally allowed to depart. When they arrived back in London (via a stopover in India) the Beatles vowed never to return to the Philippines – an oath that all four musicians kept.

Talking it down…or up? (Photo credit: AP)

Footnote: The Religious Right’s war on the Beatles
The last tour, which Epstein had long pre-committed John, Paul, George and Ringo to was back to the USA. Lennon’s perceived slight on Jesus and Christianity–although he tried to walk the comments back once he arrived in the US—plagued the entire tour4⃞. Southern fundamentalists and the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated against the “degenerate and blasphemous” Liverpool band. More death threats, some radio stations in the South banned Beatle records from the air, some even organised bonfires, inviting listeners to burn the group’s discs and merchandise. Security became a more pressing issue the longer the tour proceeded, crowds of fans broke down barriers on several occasions. The four band members harboured a genuine fear that they may be the victim of an assassin’s bullet while performing on stage. By the tour’s end all four had hardened their resolve to draw a curtain on touring (‘The Beatles’ 1966 US tour’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

Postscript: Hello/Goodbye! The Beatle’s final ever concert (leaving aside the impromptu rooftop jam in London in 1969) at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, didn’t play to a full house, resulting in a loss for the local company organising the event.

𒆜 𒆜 𒆜 𒆜 𒆜 𒆜 𒆜 𒆜 𒆜

1⃞ for which the four performers to some extent blamed Brian Epstein resulting in a loss of confidence by them in his managerial skills
2⃞ “Go Home Beatles!”
3⃞ a disastrous PR move as Epstein had been advised by the British ambassador to accept the invitation as the band’s security while in the country was in the hands of President Marcos (‘A Hard Day’s Night in Manila’, www.beatlesnumber9.com)
4⃞ John in fact proceeded to pour petrol on the fire by criticising the American military intervention in Vietnam which added to the backlash (at that time 90% of Americans still backed the US’ war in Indochina)