Maybe pigs can fly? Maybe it’s fine for cyclists to ride through red traffic lights? Maybe Liz Truss did know what she was doing?
And maybe, San Marino won a football match.
At full time, players dropped to their knees as substitutes and staff piled onto the pitch in celebration. Fans whipped their tops off and flung them around their heads. Freed from Desire by Gala was played loudly (of course it was).
It had finished San Marino 1-0 Liechtenstein, a result that on the face of it shouldn’t mean a great deal; two of European and world football’s weakest teams played out a dog of a match with precious little quality on show. It was decided by a winning goal fit to grace any Sunday league encounter.
But none of that mattered. This was a genuinely historic and joyous occasion. At the 177th time of asking, San Marino had won a competitive match of football.
For any uninitiated U.S. readers, let’s eradicate any confusion immediately; no, that’s not an autocorrected typo, and this article isn’t meant to be about Dan Marino.
This is about the world’s worst international football nation, San Marino, a tiny landlocked republic in north-central Italy. It has a population of 33,000, roughly the same size as Middletown in Orange County, New York. In the UK, we’re talking Brierley Hill near Dudley, Letchworth Garden City, Morecambe, Pontefract or Witney.
Since its first official football matches in 1990, San Marino have won precisely one football match — in a friendly against, yes, Liechtenstein at home in 2004. They have managed nine draws, including against the likes of St Lucia and Gibraltar. And they have lost 196 times.
Some of those have been utter hidings. Unyielding shellackings. Relentless drubbings.
We’re talking 9-0 to Spain, 11-0 to Netherlands and the nadir of a 13-0 home defeat against Germany in 2006.
It isn’t just European football superpowers who dish the thrashings out; Poland beat them 10-0, Ukraine smashed them 8-0, as did Norway in 2017. Teams mostly see San Marino as cannon fodder. It is not a case of whether they will beat them, but how many they’ll win by. In some cases, anything less than 5-0 becomes humiliation for the winning team.
