Sports: ConIFA European Cup to be held in Nagorno-Karabakh

The Con­fed­er­a­tion of Inde­pen­dent Football Asso­ci­a­tions (ConIFA) announced on 19 August that Nagorno-Karabakh would host its 2019 European Football Cup. It promised to specify soon the exact June dates and other details of the tour­na­ment, which will be held in capital Stepanakert.

ConIFA, an inter­na­tion­al organ­i­sa­tion based in Sweden, is comprised of teams rep­re­sent­ing regions, minori­ties, and unrecog­nised states that are inel­i­gi­ble to join FIFA or the Union of European Football Asso­ci­a­tions as national teams.

ConIFA said rep­re­sen­ta­tives visited Nagorno-Karabakh — a ‘rel­a­tive­ly undis­cov­ered part of the world’ — several times, and are now ‘confident’ in their choice.

Narine Agha­balyan, the sports minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, hailed the news, saying the tour­na­ment ‘will be a wonderful cel­e­bra­tion of sport, culture, and friend­ship’.

The Azer­bai­jani Football Fed­er­a­tion Asso­ci­a­tion ‘strongly condemned’ the tour­na­ment planned on ‘Azer­bai­jani ter­ri­to­ries occupied by Armenia’ and vowed to ‘take every necessary legal step’ to counter it, as well as formally contact the Inter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion of Asso­ci­a­tion Football (FIFA) and the Union of European Football Asso­ci­a­tions.

The 2019 games would be the third ConIFA European Cup tour­na­ment. The first was held in 2015 in Hungary, but players from both Abkhazia and South Ossetia were refused entry to the country. Following this, the Fed­er­a­tion decided to hold its 2016 World Cup in Abkhazia. The home team even­tu­al­ly won the cup.

According to the organ­i­sa­tion, 12 teams are to compete in Nagorno-Karabakh next year, with places guar­an­teed for the winners of previous European and World Cups: Padania — the sep­a­ratist region of northern Italy that won both European Cups, Northern Cyprus, Abkhazia, and Kár­pá­tal­ja — rep­re­sent­ing the Hungarian minority in the south­west­ern Zakarpattya region of Ukraine.

In 2014, the Nagorno-Karabakh football team, normally deprived of oppor­tu­ni­ties to compete in inter­na­tion­al games, took part in ConIFA’s first World Football Cup — together with Abkhazia and South Ossetia — in Östersund, Sweden. They finished in ninth place out of 12.

ConIFA neglected the Azer­bai­jani Football Fed­er­a­tion Association’s protests against Nagorno-Karabakh par­tic­i­pa­tion then, and hasn’t yet commented on the latest statement.

FIFA includes 23 members that aren’t sovereign United Nations members — like Gibraltar, Wales, and Palestine — however they cat­e­gorise the disputed ter­ri­to­ries in the South Caucasus as ‘polit­i­cal­ly sensitive areas’.

ConIFA’s tour­na­ments serve as an alter­na­tive to FIFA’s larger cham­pi­onships. The con­fed­er­a­tion also includes the Western Armenian football team, which claims to represent the Armenian diaspora across the world.

Attempts to organise inter­na­tion­al football tour­na­ments outside FIFA date back to the late 1990s. In 2014, ConIFA succeeded the annual VIVA World Cup, a similar FIFA-unaf­fil­i­at­ed tour­na­ment held from 2006–2012.

Par­tic­i­pa­tion in inter­na­tion­al athletic events is a common bone of con­tention in the South Caucasus. In August, the Georgian Football Fed­er­a­tion protested a match in Sukhumi (Sukhum) between Abkhazian and Nigerian youth teams.

For ease of reading, we choose not to use qual­i­fiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecog­nised’, or ‘partially recog­nised’ when dis­cussing insti­tu­tions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.