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In honor of Thanksgiving, we thought that we should hold our first annual turkey shoot. As you know we have been following the travails of the steroid-addled industrial-strength musk deer gland secretion mainlining North Korean women’s soccer team. With the ladies getting suspended by FIFA, North Korean soccer fans have had little to cheer about. Now via Grace Yeh In Oh at the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea we learn that the North Korean men, despite being ranked 124th in the world and already eliminated from World Cup 2014 qualification, are the champions of the world!
Sort of.
It seems that some English soccer fanatics (football-heads?) have been keeping track of the “unofficial” world champion for more than 130 years. This lineage is apparently determined figuratively speaking “boxing-style.” (If the brawling North Korean women’s team were the champs we might have thought that they meant it literally.) So in other words, England was the first champs but were eventually beaten by Scotland which in turn was beaten by…and so on. When North Korea beat Japan 1-0 earlier this week, they became the new “unofficial” champs. Congratulations!
In their announcement, the governing body, the UFWC, surely more transparent and less corrupt than the better known FIFA, observed that
“There have been some unlikely UFWC champions over the course of the tournament’s 139-year history (Angola, Israel, Venezuela…) but none from such a lowly international football standing as North Korea. The only exception is a nation that no longer exists. The Netherlands Antilles pulled off the biggest shock result in UFWC history by defeating Mexico 2-1 in 1963 to become unofficial champions. But the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved as a nation last year. So North Korea can safely claim to be the most unlikely nation still in existence to have held the UFWC title.”
North Korea’s first scheduled title defense will be against Tajikistan on 29 February in Dushanbe. No word as yet if it will be widely available on PPV.
