How do you solve a problem like CONIFA?

Draft for Scumbag College. Sung to, you know, that song from The Sound of Music.

Hi, I’m Haduhi, and I’m both a football nerd and an anarchist.

 

A bad combination, some might say. Almost certainly not a proper football man. You know the type. The ones for whom the world is neat and tidy, full of firm lines and fixed categories: rules are rules, gender is binary, the long ball is king, and political boundaries are best left unquestioned. I’m not that. I’ve always found more beauty in the loose ends and rough edges of the game, in the messy overlaps, the improvisation, the refusal to play by the book.

 

Which is probably why I’m also fascinated by CONIFA – the Confederation of Independent Football Associations. It’s a footballing body for those who don’t quite fit the official story: national teams representing unrecognized nations, stateless people, and breakaway regions that have slipped through the cracks of the international order. Kurdistan, Tamil Eelam, Abkhazia, Székely Land, places you’ve never seen at a World Cup but whose people are deeply invested in football as a form of expression, resistance, and visibility. For someone like me, CONIFA is a dream. It’s punk rock to FIFA’s stadium-filling corporate pop. It’s the zine to the glossy magazine. It reminds me that football is – and always has been – a people’s game, played in backstreets and borderlands as much as in the glare of billion-pound sponsorship deals.

 

This July, I had the chance to follow the CONIFA Asian Cup, held in the unexpected setting of Walton-on-Thames – a quiet town in Surrey, England, not exactly the beating heart of global politics. And yet, for a few days, it became a small epicentre of stateless pride and transnational solidarity. It was everything I love about football, scrappy, emotional, political, and full of stories. The final saw Tamil Eelam take on East Turkistan, two teams whose very existence challenges the boundaries of the nation-state. Both represent diasporas shaped by histories of violence, displacement, and resistance, and both played their hearts out on a modest pitch under a grey British sky. It wasn’t about TV ratings or star power. It was about being seen. About saying: We are here. We play. We belong. There’s something radical in that. Something beautifully anarchic.

 

But during the tournament, something else, something besides the football, grabbed my attention. A few days before the games kicked off, I was scrolling through CONIFA’s social media, just doing the usual nerdy deep dive, when I came across a post that made me pause. It said: “CONIFA provides teams from nations that have endured repressive and genocidal states a platform to compete internationally, preserve their cultural identities, and represent their nations.”

 

On the face of it, that makes perfect sense. This is the terrain CONIFA occupies, giving space to teams like East Turkistan, whose players represent a Uyghur diaspora shaped by the Chinese state’s ongoing campaign of surveillance, repression, and cultural erasure. A team like that doesn’t just take to the pitch to win a game. They’re playing to exist, to be heard, to say something the official world refuses to acknowledge. And yet, when I watched the opening ceremony before the final, another detail caught my eye: the flag being used by Tamil Eelam. Front and centre was a symbol lifted almost directly from the flag of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Tamil Tigers, a left-wing nationalist separatist movement that fought a brutal civil war in Sri Lanka from 1976 to 2009. The Tamil Tigers, like many similar movements, is a complicated legacy: for some, freedom fighters; for others, a terrorist organisation. Either way, it’s hard to see that flag and not recognise the politics running through it like a red thread.

 

And here’s where things start to twist. Because officially, CONIFA insists that it is not political. It repeats this like a mantra: just sport, just football, nothing more. But how does that square with the post about resisting repression and preserving cultural identity? How do you create a space for people whose very existence is politically contested, whose languages, homes, and histories are under threat, and then claim that none of it is political?

 

It’s a strange dance. On one side, CONIFA is a home for teams that FIFA will never recognise, often because doing so would upset powerful states. But on the other, it’s careful not to cross the line into open confrontation. It’s like CONIFA wants to give a microphone to the voiceless, but only if they don’t raise their voice too much. And honestly, I get it. If CONIFA declared itself openly political, it could lose what limited legitimacy it has. It might get shut out of access to venues, media, visas. It might even endanger the players. There’s a delicate balance being struck here, one that many grassroots, DIY, and dissident projects know all too well. You hold the line. You say just enough to matter, but not so much that you get shut down. But still, I can’t help but wonder what’s lost in that bargain. What conversations aren’t being had? What flags are flown half-mast because full mast would be “too political”?

 

For me, watching the final wasn’t just about two teams competing. It was about the visible and invisible forces shaping who gets to play, who gets to be recognised, and what stories get told. Football is never just a game, and in CONIFA, that truth echoes even louder. This is the contradiction. Or, if we’re being generous, the tension at the heart of CONIFA. It’s trying to carve out a space for nations without states, for peoples who’ve been repressed, displaced, or denied recognition, and yet insists on doing so without being political. As if that very act wasn’t always already political. As if fielding a team for Tamil Eelam or East Turkistan, or letting the Mapuche step onto a pitch in their own colours, could somehow be apolitical: just a bit of recreational footy.

 

This is my way of sitting with that tension. I’m not the first to notice it, and I’m certainly not the first to think deeply about it. That credit probably goes to Chris Deeley, whose book Forgotten Nations: The Incredible Stories of Football in the Shadows is, as far as I can tell, the only proper book-length treatment of CONIFA to date. It’s a good read, thoughtful, sharp, and full of the kind of left-field stories that make CONIFA so compelling.

 

Deeley traces CONIFA’s founding back to 2013. It’s still young, still figuring itself out. And unlike FIFA, with its clubs of sovereign states and international recognition, CONIFA is made up of a ragtag collective: a few de facto nations, a scattering of stateless diasporas, displaced peoples, historical regions, cultural minorities, and even, gloriously, one bioregion (shout out to Cascadia). The result is something that is by definition hard to pin down. The whole organisation lives in the grey zone between legitimacy and refusal, between nationhood and non-being. You can’t be part of CONIFA without confronting the idea of borders: who draws them, who crosses them, who’s allowed to exist inside them. These aren’t abstract questions. They’re the very conditions that shape people’s daily lives.

 

As Deeley points out, the international community isn’t exactly in the mood to redraw maps. After decades of post-colonial reshuffling and Cold War realignments, the world’s powerful nations have more or less decided that the borders we’ve got are the ones we’re sticking with, no matter how arbitrary or unjust. In other words, the goalposts have been moved. Permanently. So if you’re not already recognised by the UN, chances are you never will be. Not because your claim isn’t valid, but because it’s inconvenient. And when superpowers get involved – when the US or China or Russia weigh in on whether your nation is real enough to exist – the whole thing turns into a geopolitical mess. What you get is a kind of global border bureaucracy, where legitimacy is less about culture, history, or self-determination, and more about whether your existence suits the current world order.

 

CONIFA, by welcoming the unrecognised, becomes a sort of rogue stage, not quite a platform for revolution, but not exactly neutral ground either. Deeley tells stories of players who, just by showing up to a tournament, effectively became dissidents. People who’ve been threatened by their governments for wearing the wrong colours, for stepping onto a pitch that exists outside the official map. In some cases, players have faced serious consequences simply for being seen. That’s the weight these games carry. That’s the politics that trails every pass, every tackle, every goal.

 

And so, even if CONIFA tries to claim neutrality, even if it desperately wants to be just about football, the truth is, it never can be. Not when recognition is the issue. Not when playing the game is itself an act of defiance. CONIFA claims to be apolitical. And to be fair, when they say it, they seem to mean it; there’s no hint of irony or spin. The line is delivered with total sincerity, often repeated like a protective charm: we’re just here to let people play football under whatever flag they wish, nothing more. In theory, political expression by teams during tournaments is banned. The idea is to create a neutral space where anyone can take part, no matter where they come from, without dragging in the messy geopolitics of recognition, legitimacy, or historical trauma. But here’s the thing: there’s no such thing as just football.

 

As Chris Deeley puts it in Forgotten Nations:

 

“Football stripped of its wider context is nothing, a shell of the world’s most popular sport. Football stripped of context has no rivalries, no branching narratives – in short, no soul. Would it be simpler if football were alone, a pure, sterile piece of sporting expression? Maybe. Would it be recognisable as the same game, the same experience? Never.”

 

Football is all context. It’s the flags in the stands, the songs, the rivalries, the colours, the people who show up in rain and sun to shout their lungs out. It’s political not because someone gives a speech or waves a banner, but because it means something to the people who live it. And that meaning is always bound up in identity, belonging, memory: in other words, politics. To call CONIFA apolitical is, frankly, a farce. Not because they’re secretly plotting revolutions –  they’re not – but because the very act of giving a platform to stateless teams, exiled diasporas, and unrecognised nations is political by nature. It challenges the idea that legitimacy only flows through statehood, or that FIFA’s map of the world is the only one that counts.

 

For many CONIFA participants – particularly those from breakaway territories or refugee communities – simply stepping onto the pitch is a political act. It’s a declaration of identity and defiance. The stakes are real. In past tournaments, players have received threats, been monitored, or even penalised by the governments they fled. This isn’t hypothetical. That said, the terrain isn’t the same for everyone. The Yorkshire team doesn’t exactly face state repression. The Cascadian bioregion team has its own weird politics – identified with both green-anarchist eco types and a fringe of white nationalist groups. As Deeley notes, this shows the tightrope CONIFA and its teams walk every day: between being just a football team and being a living, breathing political symbol. I get the tightrope walk. I really do. But I’m not sure how long it can last.

 

Sporting teams aren’t just games. They’re potent vehicles of cultural self-representation. They tell stories about who we are, where we come from, and who we want to be. Pretending that none of this is political – or pretending that football can be neatly separated from those stories – doesn’t make it true. It just makes it harder to understand what’s really going on. And that’s the problem. When CONIFA clings to a claim of neutrality, it shuts down the possibility of grappling with the meaning of what these teams are doing. You can’t understand the symbolic power of a team like Tamil Eelam or West Papua if you’re forced to ignore the political history they carry. You can’t honour their participation if you refuse to name the context they’re playing in. As Deeley puts it, “the time will come, and it feels as though it’s coming sooner rather than later, when CONIFA must choose between its claim of strict apoliticism and taking some kind of moral stand.” 

 

So how do you solve a problem like CONIFA?

 

So far, the strategy seems to be: hide the contradiction under the kitchen table and hope no one trips over it. If a group of people claim national status for themselves, however defined, and they want to play football, CONIFA lets them in. No more questions asked. And maybe that’s fair, as a starting point. But I don’t think it’ll hold in the long run. The cracks are already showing. Still, and maybe this is me speaking more with my anarchist hat on than my football one, I think the mess is part of what makes CONIFA valuable. It touches on something deeper: the fact that we still don’t have the right vocabulary, let alone frameworks, to talk about political life beyond the state. About what it means to represent a nation without becoming a government. To hold identity without holding territory. To build solidarity without borders.

 

The teams in CONIFA are nations but not states. They’re not governments. They’re not vying for control of land or launching bids at the UN. What if we understood them not through the old grammar of nationalism, but through something like Huey P. Newton’s theory of intercommunalism? A vision of collective identity rooted in shared struggle, diaspora, culture, memory, not necessarily territory or state power. Maybe football, scrappy, joyous, inclusive football, can help develop that grammar. A new way of imagining community, one that doesn’t rely on maps drawn by empires or decisions made in back rooms in Brussels or Beijing. CONIFA is flawed. It’s contradictory. It’s a mess. But it’s also trying – however imperfectly – to make space for people the rest of the world has ignored. And for me, that’s a good thing. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it can’t be tidied up.

 

 

More information

CONIFA: https://www.conifa.org

Deeley, Chris (2019) Forgotten Nations: The Incredible Stories of Football in the Shadows. Worthing: Pitch Publishing.