In soccer, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each have their own national team. In the Olympics, the four nations compete under one National Olympic Committee. Their athletes go by “Team GB,” which supposedly stands for the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic team. To make matters more confusing, Great Britain’s Olympic committee has an agreement with Ireland’s which says Northern Irish athletes can choose whether to represent Great Britain or Ireland in international competition. Evidently, the IOC signed off on this? I just spent 45 minutes on Wikipedia. What I’m gathering is that no governing body has absolute power in the world of international sports. (Reddit and Quora were actively unhelpful with this, by the way. It’s always impressive how wrong people can be.)
There are a lot of places that are kind of sort of countries. Some people would call them countries. Some wouldn’t. Maybe some would call them nations but not countries, or states but not nations, or countries but not states. These range from places like Taiwan (an independent country not recognized by the UN out of deference to China) to places like Luhansk Oblast (Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine that not even Venezuela recognizes as independent). There is a wide range. This gets complicated in sports because it’s complicated in real life.
In sports, the International Olympic Committee has historically done things differently from FIFA and its continental confederations. From what I can gather, this wasn’t due to differences in viewpoint as much as different decisions, sometimes arbitrary, regarding specific places. England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland each had a national team before the World Cup existed, so they got to continue having national teams. When most of the island of Ireland gained independence from the U.K., then, the consistent thing to do was give Northern Ireland its own national team as well. With the Olympics, since the U.K. started with its own unified team, it continued that way, and only Ireland (and some Northern Irish athletes) went off on their own.
By 1996, confusion had evidently reached the threshold where the IOC wanted to draw a hard and fast line on what was a country and what wasn’t. I don’t know what led to this, but I’m going to take a guess and say, “The Balkans.” The IOC’s new rule is to only recognize new National Olympic Committees when they represent “an independent state recognized by the international community.” So, if a place is a “dependent territory” or a “constituent country,” it doesn’t get its own Olympic team.
What about Puerto Rico? Our local dependent territory? There’s an important part of this rule, and it’s the word “new” in the paragraph above. If a place already had a National Olympic Committee before 1996, it got to keep it so long as its relationship with its parent country (or whatever you want to call it) didn’t change. This is why Puerto Rico still has its own Olympic teams. Puerto Rico had an Olympic committee before the IOC changed the rules. The IOC was not going to bother trying to take it away, especially because (I’m guessing here) the IOC was trying to make future decisions easier, not reanimate previous decisions.
What’s FIFA’s rule for what constitutes a country?
*giggle*
It’s the same thing.
In 2016, FIFA changed its own statutes to use the same definition of “country” that the IOC uses. I don’t know whether it was trying to align with the IOC or if it just came to the same conclusion as the IOC as to what would induce the least severe headache, but FIFA uses the same definition. Key differences: FIFA made this decision twenty years later. FIFA doesn’t decide who gets into the continental federations. (UEFA, CONCACAF, etc.) FIFA’s corruption manifests differently from the IOC’s. It’s easier to form a national soccer team than it is to form a national Olympic team. Lastly, soccer is a bigger deal than the Olympics in the U.K., and the English and Scottish and Welsh national teams are important to soccer’s identity.
With the help of Wikipedia (Olympic list, soccer list), various situations:
- Puerto Rico has an NOC recognized by the IOC. It also has a soccer team recognized by CONCACAF and FIFA.
- England does not have an NOC. It does have a soccer team recognized by UEFA and FIFA.
- French Polynesia has an NOC, but it isn’t recognized by the IOC. It has a soccer team recognized by FIFA and the OFC, but FIFA and the OFC call it Tahiti.
- Monaco has an NOC recognized by the IOC. It kind of has a national soccer team, but it hasn’t played since 2017 and it isn’t aligned with FIFA or UEFA. It would meet FIFA’s definition of a country.
- The Vatican City doesn’t have an NOC, but it meets the qualifications if it wants one. It occasionally has a national soccer team and that team is not aligned with FIFA or UEFA, although again it would meet the necessary definition of a country.
- Niue, an associated state of New Zealand, has an NOC, but it isn’t recognized by the IOC even though it might meet the qualifications? It is unclear to me whether it has or hasn’t applied for IOC recognition. Niue’s national soccer team lost its associate OFC membership in 2021 due to inactivity. I like to imagine it waited too long to reset its OFC password and had to call the OFC IT department, then gave up. That’s how I got locked out of an email address in college.
- Transnistria, a breakaway state in Moldova, has an unrecognized NOC. It also might have an unrecognized soccer team? It was part of CONIFA (a global soccer federation for countries unrecognized by FIFA) but it left in 2015.
The list goes on, and on, and on. I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to make a national soccer team for Texas. I don’t get the idea that there’s a lot of overlap, though, between Texas separatists and people who like soccer. Maybe I should check on Quebec.
*googling*
They’re part of CONIFA! They beat Tibet 21–0 in 2013! Great. Now I have to figure out how a Tibetan soccer team got out of Tibet alive.
