Vatican’s National Football Team

The Vatican’s national football team is appointed to represents Vatican and competes for international games.  Vatican City has known to be the “smallest independent state in the world’ and that is why they have their own national football team.  The team is one of the seven national football teams that are non-FIFA members; others are Monaco, Palau, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Nauru and Federated States of Micronesia)

 

The Swiss Guards and the museum guards are the only people that qualify to participate for the Vatican national football team. This shows that the players of the team have a tight schedule time to practice because of their duties. Players are having a hard time to develop their football skills due to the security that are highly maintained at all times. Actually they can go for several with no proper trainings or preparations for the reasons that the Vatican national football team lacks international games appearances. Thus, the calendar of the football team is under an unfavorable circumstance.

 

The team played several of tournaments with other local teams in Rome as a friendly game but with their poor performance, the Vatican national football team is far from winning. They do their trainings in a small ground outside of the Vatican. The only international games they had competed against were with Monaco in 2002 and 2001. It is unfortunate to say that they did not win any of these international games.

 

The 2002 games made it a draw of 1-1 while in the 2011 games got their lost of 2-1. They also have friendly games played with San Marino which they drew 1-1, against Palestine’s national football team which they lost 9-1. The team managed to play only seven games so far.

 

The Vatican is in full support of their national football team. Throughout the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, he used to visit the team while in training and giving support to players sharing the significance of sports and playing as a representative of their state.

 

There are suggestions about getting players from the Catholic seminaries that will come from other part of the countries to improve the Vatican national football team but this has not yet verified. This will be a good way of allowing the team to have more time of practice and interacting with other players too. At the meantime, the only player who is qualified to join the Vatican national football team is the Swiss Guards and the museum guards.