Home 2010-2012 – Hummel
The Country
As a UK overseas territory dangling from the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, Gibraltar’s political status has for centuries been hoofing sizeable dents in Anglo-Spanish relations. First captured from the Spaniards in 1704, the subsequent 1713 Treaty of Utrecht ceded sole control of the Rock to Britain, who quickly set about reinventing the place as a sort of climatically inaccurate ‘Little England’ replete with red telephone booths, tacky sports bars and a pasty rabble of sunburned halfwits drunkenly screaming “SOVEREIGNTY” whilst liberally soiling their Union Jack underpants. Spain, meanwhile, really would rather like it back. Their hopes were however quashed in a 2002 referendum that saw 99% of Gibraltarians reject the idea of becoming Spanish, with the 1% who voted in favour probably not quite grasping that this wouldn’t actually allow them to tan any easier.
Despite Gibraltar’s severely limited size (just 2.6 sq miles), they have managed to squeeze in a nature reserve, which is situated high up in the heavens atop the Rock. Here tourists can meet perhaps the most famous Gibraltarians of all and Europe’s only wild monkeys, the Barbary Macaques, although quite how they clambered to such lofty heights in the first place remains something of a mystery. See below.
Amusingly, the apes are now becoming a little too abundant and even somewhat loutish. In 2014, thirty of the more delinquent members of the troop were packed off to Scotland under the consensus that their random acts of violence, reinvention of faeces as a projectile and a tendency to extract most of their meals from a dustbin was behaviour more befitting the Blair Drummond Safari Park in Stirling, with the added bonus that if they ever escaped into the town centre then chances are nobody would ever notice.
Aside from attempting to avoid the attentions of these hairy little gobshites, opportunities for diversion in Gibraltar are in rather short supply. Consequently many tourists (particularly Brits) opt to treat it as a day trip from their bases on the Costa del Sol. Mind you, just getting there at all can be fraught with peril. Not only are Spain’s border guards notoriously spiteful – often deliberately delaying vehicles for hours on end – but once safely across, the main road into town traverses the runway of Gibraltar’s busy international airport. Hardly reassuring when you’re being delivered by a Spanish taxi driver, whose levels of due care and attention will likely be undermined due to his being both Spanish and a taxi driver.
The National Team
Given that Gibraltar’s membership of UEFA and FIFA stretches back only as far as 2013 and 2016 respectively, it might surprise a few folk to learn that the GFA was founded way back in 1895 and is in fact the seventh oldest national association in the world. For the longest time, however, there was no official national team, just a representative XI playing occasional friendlies against club sides. This all abruptly changed by the late 90s and controversy swiftly followed. In 1999 an application by the Rock to join UEFA predictably invoked the ire of Spain, who threatened to withdraw the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona from the Champions League should Gibraltar be accepted. Always ready and willing to stick up for the enormous guys, UEFA promptly sat on the GFA’s application for a few years, stealthily changed their entry criteria just enough so that they could legally say no and then, to nobody’s great surprise, said no.
Anyway, long story slightly less long*, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) got involved, called bullshit on UEFA’s skulduggery and insisted they consider the case purely on sporting and not political merit. As a result, the Gibraltarians were belatedly admitted in 2013 and also gained full FIFA recognition three years, allowing the squad to at last fulfil their dream of being crushed 9-0 by Belgium in a World Cup qualifier. To be fair, with a population of just 32,000 and barely any professional players to choose from, results were never going to be gentle and Gibraltar’s first 20 competitive fixtures yielded 20 defeats with a quite sobering 103 goals conceded. On a more encouraging note, their inaugural Nations League campaign in 2018 saw victories over Liechtenstein at home and, shockingly, Armenia away, results that have moved the team up to an all time high of second bottom in the UEFA rankings. IN YOUR FACE, SAN MARINO.
*I have neither the blog space nor the inclination to delve deep into the story of Gibraltar’s battles with UEFA and Spanish football. Instead I thoroughly recommend Steve Menary’s excellent book entitled “Outcasts! The Lands That FIFA Forgot”, which includes an entire chapter on the subject.
The Shirt
One of the perils in attempting to pin down a shirt from every single FIFA member is the possibility that some new country will abruptly emerge, cobble together a team and leave us collectors with an additional piece of polyester to hunt down. When I started this mission FIFA membership stood at 208, but this has since risen to 211 following the admission of South Sudan (2012), Kosovo and Gibraltar (both 2016), all of whom displayed scant regard for how their desire to enter the World Cup would mildly inconvenience some eejit from Milton Keynes with an overactive eBay account. Very selfish, that.
Luckily, having followed Gibraltar’s case for quite some time beforehand, I’d already snapped up one of their shirts. This was, admittedly, more as a show of support for their cause than anything else as I was convinced that UEFA and FIFA would pull some nonsensical excuse out of their arses to deny them. Their surprise but welcome acceptance has rendered this rather tidy Hummel design as an anomaly within my collection; a non-FIFA shirt representing a FIFA member nation. The kit was in use between 2010-2012, before the team acquired formal recognition, and was worn against the likes of the Isle of Wight and Alderney at the 2011 Island Games, a competition that technically, as a peninsula, Gibraltar had no business entering. I mean, you don’t see Japan competing at the Copa America, or Israel in the European Championships, do you? What’s that? Oh. Never mind.
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