Is Greenland football’s newest nation-in-waiting?
By Roddy Cairns - Posted 6 June 2024
The world of international football could be about to gain its newest member, with news that Greenland has made an application to join CONCACAF, the regional International Sports Federation for North/Central America and the Caribbean. It’s a move that has raised more than a few eyebrows, both due to Greenland’s traditional links to Europe and its status as a Danish territory. This blog post will look to break down the regulatory elements of Greenland’s application.
What is Greenland?
Greenland is sometimes referred to as the world’s largest island (a metric which excludes continental landmasses such as Australia), and geographically sits in the North American Arctic, to the northeast of Canada. It is an autonomous territory of Denmark, meaning that, whilst it has a high degree of autonomy and a devolved legislature, it remains part of the sovereign state of Denmark and its 57,000 inhabitants are Danish (and EU) citizens. Culturally, it is in some ways rather distinct from Copenhagen – nearly 90% of its population is ethnically Inuit (or mixed Inuit-European), and its official language is Greenlandic (an Eskimo-Aleut language) rather than Danish.
Greenland’s name is one of the world’s most famous misnomers, given the majority of its land area is covered in a permanent ice sheet. According to the Icelandic sagas, the name was a publicity stunt – exiled Norwegian murderer Erik the Red established a settlement on the island, and named it Greenland to make it sound pleasant and attract more settlers.
In footballing terms, Greenland has had a national football association (the KAK) since 1971. As well as administering domestic football (including a national championship that is famously decided over the course of just one week), the KAK has been fielding a Greenland national team at various levels since 1980. As well as regular fixtures against neighbours Faroe Islands and Iceland, Greenland have traditionally competed in the Island Games (against the likes of Shetland and Jersey), and for a time were a member of the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (CONIFA), which facilitates international competitions between non-FIFA teams (including disputed regions/nations such as Kurdistan and Transnistria).
Attempts to join UEFA
Greenland appears to have first started seriously considering a future as a recognised international football team some time around 1998, when their then-coach Sepp Piontek stated that he had “asked UEFA to look into the possibility of Greenland becoming an independent soccer country”.
Logic would seem to dictate that Greenland would be welcomed with open arms as a member of UEFA and FIFA. After all the Faroe Islands has a fully-fledged national team, despite enjoying the same constitutional status within the Danish state as Greenland. In the period from 1988-2004 it was joined on the FIFA list by other non-sovereign nations such as Aruba, American Samoa, New Caledonia and Palestine, all of which are controlled in some way or other by another FIFA member.
Unfortunately for Greenland, there are two fundamental issues which currently stand in the way of it becoming a UEFA and FIFA member. One traditional barrier was infrastructure – with most pitches being made of clay and limited stadium facilities, Greenland was long behind FIFA’s infrastructure requirements. Throw in the very limited 3-month window for playing football in the Arctic nation and the issues start to rack up. This is something the KAK have worked to remedy in recent years, however, with investment in artificial pitches and the construction of a small stadium in the capital, Nuuk.
The larger issue is the “recognised independent state” membership requirement which both FIFA and UEFA added to their rules early in the new millennium. This is governed by Article 5 of the UEFA statutes, and Article 10 of the FIFA statutes. Whilst the old UEFA rule allowed membership to be granted to “national football associations situated in the continent Europe which are responsible for the organisation and implementation of football related matters in their particular territory” (which allowed for some leeway on what constitutes a “nation”), since 2001 this has been tightened up significantly. The current rule opens membership only to national football associations “based in a country which is recognised as an independent state by the majority of members of the United Nations”.
The change was a reactive one, which arose from the application of Gibraltar (a British Territory, under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the UK but not part of it) to join UEFA and FIFA, and subsequent legal battles which ensued. A UEFA Expert Panel concluded that Gibraltar was entitled to admission as a UEFA member under the existing rules, but recommended amendment of the statutes to ensure that in future only UN-recognised states would be able to be granted UEFA membership. In effect, the drawbridge was being pulled up behind Gibraltar and the other newcomers of the late 90s and early 2000s.
A similar amendment was made to FIFA’s statutes in 2004, with the definition of “country” (the unit required for membership) now being given as “an independent state recognised by the international community”.
The switch of focus to members requiring to be sovereign states is perhaps not surprising, given the political context in Europe. From Catalunya to Flanders, from Abhkazia to Veneto, the continent is awash with movements advocating for independence or at least regional autonomy of one type or another. Spain, in particular, tends to be keen to shut down talk of less stringent entry requirements, presumably due to awareness of how much a fully-fledged national team can do to maintain awareness of a national culture (although, to be fair, club sides Barcelona and Athletic Club already do a very effective job of promoting Catalan and Basque identity). If every secessionist or regionalist identity was allowed its own national team, UEFA’s international football landscape would become even more crowded and politically charged than it already is.
Scotland, incidentally, benefits from an enhanced level of “grandfather rights”, with the independent status of the four UK associations being expressly enshrined in the FIFA Statutes at Article 10(6). Whilst on the face of it this may be surprising (Scotland’s devolved settlement being akin to Greenland’s in many respects), in context it is appropriate. After all, Scotland and England invented international football, with the first ever international match being a game between the two in Partick, Glasgow on 30 November 1872. By the time the membership requirements were tightened up, the Scots and English had been playing international football for around 130 years. This heritage is further recognised with the countries’ (and Wales and Northern Ireland’s) continuing place on the rule making body IFAB. It would seem entirely inappropriate to disenfranchise the nations that gave the world both the modern style of football and the concept of international football rivalry.
But for Greenland and the KAK, the 21st century requirement for new members to be sovereign states rather appears to sound the death knell for any hopes of gaining UEFA or FIFA membership, as it is undeniable that they are a constituent part of the sovereign state of Denmark – which already has a team.
All that being said, there could be one final route open to UEFA and FIFA membership for Greenland. Gibraltar’s admission as a member was not straightforward, with huge pressure from the Spanish FA to reject their application (for political reasons related to dispute the status of Gibraltar, as well as perhaps their own squeamishness in regard to the Basques, Catalans and others). This meant that, despite making their application in 1997, Gibraltar did not gain full UEFA membership until 16 years and three Court of Arbitration for Sport litigations later, and needed a further CAS spat to add full FIFA membership. One of CAS’ rulings was that Gibraltar’s UEFA membership case must be decided on the basis of the rules at the time it first applied (i.e. in 1997, before the addition of the requirement to be an internationally recognised sovereign state – which Gibraltar is not).
If Greenland had made an initial application at the same time as Gibraltar, they could try to argue for the same treatment. Indeed, it appears they may have done – the Gibraltar v FIFA CAS case makes reference (at paragraph 19) to Greenland having had made an application to become a FIFA member some time prior to 27 May 1998, when such application was said to have been “deferred” by FIFA’s executive committee (alongside those of Gibraltar and Bhutan). However, the matter is shrouded in mystery and there is some doubt as to whether this was a formal application or merely an information request or expression of interest (former Danish FA chairman Allan Hansen suggests the latter). In any event, there is arguably a distinction between the Gibraltar situation (where they were actively pushing their application and fighting rejections from 1997 until they were finally admitted to UEFA and FIFA), and Greenland’s (where there seems to have been no further formal movement post-1997). In such circumstances, it is questionable whether Greenland would succeed in convincing CAS that they should be granted the same status as Gibraltar, even if it did turn out they applied contemporaneously.
The CONCACAF option
In any event, Greenland’s KAK seems to have reached the conclusion that knocking on a half-open door is preferable to trying to batter down a locked one. They have opted to explore the CONCACAF route.
CONCACAF’s statutes lack the same strict interpretation of which sort of nations can be a member, with the national governing body only required to control football “within a country or territory of CONCACAF” (Art 1(29)). This much looser criterion works in the favour of Greenland – whilst it is not as sovereign state, it is undoubtedly at least a territory.
Indeed, even a cursory glance at the list of existing CONCACAF members shows a number who have a similar partial level of autonomy to Greenland, or in some cases much less. Most striking are the examples of French Guiana, Guadeloupe and Martinique. Despite their Caribbean locations (French Guiana is actually in South America, albeit on the Northern Caribbean coast), these three CONCACAF members are constitutionally each an “overseas department and region of France”. This means that they have the exact same status as a region or department of Metropolitan France, such as Paris or Dordogne. French laws apply, and the three territories are considered fully integrated parts of the European Union, with the Euro used as currency. The island of Bonaire holds a similar constitutional position within the Netherlands. Greenland’s high degree of autonomy within the Danish state and geographical remoteness from Copenhagen surely makes it at least as worthy of an international football team of its own as some of these existing CONCACAF members.
From a footballing perspective, CONCACAF might make more sense too. Greenland’s population of around 57,000 may be football-mad (with around 10% of the population said to be registered football players), but it would place it firmly among the “micro-state” category of European football powers with populations under 100,000. If you look at the results of the other micro-states over the years (the Faroes, Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Gibraltar), it is clear that it can be a chastening existence trying to compete with the likes of Germany, France and Italy.
CONCACAF has far more members of roughly equivalent size to Greenland. Setting aside the giants of USA. Mexico and Canada, there are a great many more countries against whom Greenland could hope to be competitive. There are even some who it would rather dwarf, such as Montserrat (4,443) and Anguilla (15,780). Given that Greenland’s most recent international result was a 5-0 loss to Turkmenistan (143rd in FIFA’s rankings) on 1 June 2024, one suspects they may have more chance to develop as a team in the rather gentler climes of CONCACAF than in UEFA’s shark-infested waters.
Conclusion
Greenland’s experiences over the years show us that there is no one answer to the question “what is a nation” – at least not in footballing terms. The answer may very well depend on who you ask, and when. For the sake of the footballers of Nuuk, Qaqortoq and Sisimiut, it is to be hoped that CONCACAF take the view that the answer can include Greenland – allowing this most intriguing of nations to take its place on the world footballing stage, and a generation of Greenlandic footballers to represent their homeland with pride.
Photo: Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland (contributed to Shutterstock by Oliver Foerstner).