In 2018, a group of enthusiastic and evidently competent amateurs staged the best football tournament ever held on British soil. In 2024, it’s not entirely clear when that tournament’s ever going to happen again.
The 2018 CONIFA World Football Cup (yeah, you can see why FIFA snapped up ‘World Cup’ when it was available) was a 16-team international tournament in London that might have passed you by. Let’s rewind a bit. CONIFA is an organisation which groups together the ‘international teams’ that FIFA doesn’t currently recognise. We’re talking breakaway states, self-declared republics and ethnic groups.
The 16 teams were: Barawa (nominally hosting, with their team largely living in London), Abkhazia, Panjab, Padania, Northern Cyprus, Székely Land, United Koreans in Japan, Ellan Vannin, Kárpytálja, Tamil Eelam, Western Armenia, Tuvalu, Tibet, Matabeleland, Kabylia, and Cascadia.
It was an astonishing week and a half—16 amateur ‘national’ teams from five continents converged on one of the most expensive cities in the world, and given that London is the city it is, all of them had passionate support. In short, it was brilliant—the equivalent of threading a normal sewing needle with a gym rope.
To hear former CONIFA General Secretary Sascha Düerkop tell it when looking back, “I think it was by far the most diverse, and that's what sticks out in comparison to all the other tournaments. In London, it was more colourful—you could say chaotic, as well. There were fans from all over the world, often already living in London, so they didn't have to travel far. We had all kinds of different minorities, linguistic groups, and ethnic groups involved in the tournaments, bringing in their flavour. We had different tastes from different chefs cooking at the matches. We had different live music.
“I went to a match where we had a Tibetan chef cooking in the stadium in Bracknell. They provided him with the kitchen, and he provided Tibetan snacks, and there was Tibetan live music and all kinds of stuff. A huge Tibetan community joined that, but also a couple of kabillion coming to the same match. They were playing Kárpátalja that day, so there were maybe 200 Kárpátaljans singing some of their songs and dancing over Tibetan music. That kind of vibe we didn't have at any other tournament.”
And with no other tournament to fight with for eyeballs since they’d kicked off before the 2018 FIFA World Cup, CONIFA was the only game in town for ten days. The final, in Enfield, took place the best part of a week before FIFA’s Russia 2018 tournament launched.
It was probably the peak of CONIFA’s existence as an organisational entity, and the comedown from that joyous few weeks lingers to this day. The thing is, that isn’t entirely CONIFA’s fault. What’s become clear, in hindsight, is that CONIFA and its committee members were at their best when they were working to be conduits for other people’s stories.
You want to hear a few of those stories? Of course you do.
