Paul Watson is a journalist and former coach of the Pohnpei state football team in the Federated States of Micronesia. Here, he argues that FIFA have not shown enough support for football Micronesia.
It may have become a standard cliche for a manager to put a positive spin on a heavy defeat, but in Micronesia’s record-breaking 46-0 loss to Vanuatu, the score-line really didn’t tell the story.
I’m not trying to claim that Micronesia had the upper hand in possession, or that 46 times the referee’s assistants missed offside calls, but the action on the field in Papua New Guinea was secondary to a much greater struggle: Micronesia’s battle for recognition from FIFA.
These days I’m no more than a supporter of Micronesia, but back in 2009 the tiny Pacific nation became my home when Matthew Conrad, my flatmate, and I decided on a whim to find the world’s worst football team and play for them.
Our juvenile quest led us to discover Pohnpei, one of the world’s wettest islands, whose team had never won a game and Wikipedia stated were: ‘the worst team in the world.’ As two Sunday Leaguers with frustrated Premier League ambitions, this was what we were waiting for.
Anyway, I’m genuinely proud of Micronesia, walking out to play a second and third game after losing 30-0 plus is what real football is about
— Paul Watson (@paul_c_watson) July 8, 2015
However, our childish ambitions were quickly given a jolt when it turned out that Pohnpei had no active team. Rather than players, we had to become coaches and administrators but also groundsmen on a pitch that was always flooded and a habitat to toads, in a country that had, and still has, one of the world’s most obese populations in the world – its people who suffering with addictions to local narcotic substances called sakau and betel nut.
We’d probably have headed home had we not been met with such unbridled enthusiasm from Pohnpei’s ragtag bunch of footballers. There were barely 20 regular players on the island with a vast range of abilities and a sometimes loose grasp of the rules, but they were passionate. So passionate, in fact, that one player called Roger – a fresh-faced teenager with limitless energy and a dynamite left-foot – walked for an hour barefoot each day to come and play in our kick-abouts which resembled a cross between football and water polo and ended when the one remaining floodlight at PICS Field proved insufficient each night.
The turning point in Pohnpei came when we met Dilshan Senarathgoda, a player gifted with the sort of natural ability Matt and I could only dream of. He’d been trying to teach others on the island for years, and with his guidance we set up the first league, which we grandly titled the Pohnpei Premier League.
After some strange early contests, the Pohnpei Premier League started to catch on. Teams came from across the island from church groups, the College of Micronesia and Dilshan’s prodigies, who formed the triumphant Island Pitbulls, playing in shirts donated by Yeovil Town.
The elite players from the league were offered the chance to train in the state squad. We vowed to take the squad to the neighbouring island of Guam in search of the hallowed first win in their history. That trip motivated the players to greater efforts, they showed discipline because for the first time they believed they could achieve something through sport. We trained five days a week, starting at 6am in a rustic gym above a pig pen and ending when the light failed on PICS Field.
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When we did eventually tour Guam – thanks to sponsorship from Coyne Airways, a freight airline based in London –Matt and I were braced for the worst. But it never came. In fact we won against a second division Guam club 7-1 – the first win in Pohnpeian football history. Our lads even held a Guam national youth team to a 3-0 defeat.
Throughout our time in Pohnpei, we had made vain appeals to FIFA for development assistance but were met with a wall of silence and baffling protocol. One issue was that Pohnpei is not a nation, it is one of four Federated States of Micronesia along with Chuuk, Yap and Kosrae.
To be treated as a functioning nation, all islands had to be involved – no mean feat given how disparate they are. But Pohnpei wasn’t the only Micronesian island playing and as Matt and I left, the official Micronesian FA was formed with representatives on each island. Football flourished in Chuuk and Yap thanks to the hard work of Olympic Committee representatives Paul Lane and Clark Graham – Micronesia was finally surely ready for FIFA assistance.
At the end of 2010, Micronesia applied to FIFA, aiming for a place in the East Asian Confederation, which was recommended rather than Oceania. The nation had a guide in Guam – another small island that had rocketed up the rankings thanks to FIFA aid. For several months Micronesia waited for an email. Eventually a site visit was set for FIFA to come and assess their needs – the first step on a lengthy road to funding. However, that visit was cancelled, and so was the next one and the one after that.
In 2014, Pohnpei hosted the Micro Games – a mini-Olympics for islands in the region. Football was included and teams from Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Palau competed. Yet at the end of 2014, Micronesia was still awaiting the visit that could unlock the funds needed to employ its first football specialist.
The South Pacific Games presented a dilemma. Micronesia would be horribly outgunned, but if they didn’t enter they couldn’t show FIFA they were serious about becoming a football nation. Bravely, and with assistance from the FSM Olympic Committee, they entered. A team was selected mostly made up of players from Yap and Pohnpei, two islands separated by thousands of miles of ocean and thousands of dollars of airfares. Training had to be done en route to the Games and packed into a matter of weeks.
The results were inevitable. As soon as the world record toppled against Fiji, the media barrage began. Few asked how such a result came to pass, they were too busy having fun. The battle for Micronesia now is to guard the brave and shell-shocked players from the worst of the social media deluge and encourage them to keep on playing. In the meantime this is surely the clearest possible argument there has ever been for FIFA delivering development funding to Micronesia. And if that happens, this bruising defeat will have become a victory.
