Things weren’t always weird. Back in 2007, I was a journalist for Football Italia. But quite soon after that, my career took a rather different turn.
I was also a failed semi-pro player who’d only ever reached the heights of being released by Tooting and Mitcham’s reserves. Unlike most rejects, however, I refused to give up the dream gracefully. Instead, I decided to move the goalposts with my flatmate Matt Conrad.
Together, we sought out the lowest-ranked international teams we could find, in the wild hope of qualifying to play for one of them and fulfil our lifelong dream of getting a cap. When we found that in fact, no side was bad enough to consider us, we stumbled upon the non-FIFA Rankings for teams not yet recognised by them.
There, among the likes of Greenland and Tibet, was the tiny Micronesian island of Pohnpei. According to Wikipedia, they’d never won a game and were “widely considered the weakest team in the world”. After finding an email for their FA on an old website, we got a reply from its head, Charles Musana. Bad news: he’d just moved. Good: to London. After meeting over a curry, he gently told us that we couldn’t play for Pohnpei – but that we could coach them.
THE HEAD OF POHNPEI’S FA SAID WE COULDN’T PLAY FOR THEM – BUT WE
