ConIFA World Football Cup
World Soccer|July 2018

The non-FIFA affiliated tournament comes to London

Steve Menary
ConIFA World Football Cup

Apart from Tonga’s brief Italian sojourn in 1991 and sporadic visits by French territories to Paris, Europe is another world for most Pacific Island national teams. But not for Tuvalu. One of the last countries in the world yet to be recognised by FIFA, they visited Holland in 2013 and then London for this year’s ConIFA World Football Cup.

“The government of Tuvalu supported us,” says Soseala Tinilau, Tuvalu National Football Association (TNFA) president of a trip that saw 23 players and four officials spend two days flying via Fiji and South Korea to London. “We received money from them to purchase our tickets.”

This story is from the July 2018 edition of World Soccer.

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This story is from the July 2018 edition of World Soccer.

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