World’s dispossessed and never-will-be nations have been brought together in a tournament hosted by a small Somali port but being played in London

The World Football Cup began in London this week with a match at the Queen Elizabeth Stadium. This statement is true but may need clarification: it might sound like a report from a parallel universe in which the Fifa nobs sent their 2018 tournament to England not Russia.

The World Football Cup is not quite the actual World Cup. It is not even a consolation event for the countries temporarily locked out of the World Cup, those obscure places such as Italy, the Netherlands and the United States, who failed to qualify. It is more of a consolation prize in life.

It is for those places locked out of Fifa and, in almost every case, the international community as a whole: the world’s outcasts, the dispossessed, the not-quite nations, the once-were nations and in many cases never-will-be nations. Some are not geographical entities at all, such as Japan’s Korean minority. Some are intermittently, and almost always unhappily, in the news: like the Romany people and the Rohingya of Myanmar (neither of whom qualified).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Northern Cyprus and Karpatalya shake hands before their match at Enfield. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Guardian

There is also an undercurrent of humour and satire. Among the 47 members of the Confederation of International Football Associations (Conifa) are Yorkshire, admitted too late for this tournament, and Cascadia, a greenish, libertarian, un-Trumpian confection with a slight whiff of dope, covering British Columbia and the north-western states of the US.

But the overwhelming theme is tragedy. The opening match at the Queen Elizabeth Stadium was between the reigning champions, Abkhazia (a breakaway from former Soviet Georgia), and Tibet. Hardly any of the Tibetan players or supporters have even been there. Their parents and grandparents were forced into exile after China invaded their country in 1951. “These players live all over the world,” says Tenzin Kunga from the unofficial Tibetan embassy in London. “But they are all Tibetans. I have never been there myself. But I dream of Tibet, always.”

The stadium was not quite as grand as the royal name suggests. This was the home ground of non-league Enfield Town, less pretentiously known as Donkey Lane. About 300 people turned up to watch, first, Tibet bravely restrict Abkhazia to three goals and then Northern Cyprus, the Cypriot Turks, take on Karpatalya in a skilful and combative match that ended in a sending-off, a punch-up and a 1-1 draw.

The Turkish half of Cyprus, unrecognised by the world, has 32 teams in two leagues (“Not professional,” I was told, “but the players are well-paid”). They cannot even play against anyone from their protectors, Turkey, because even President Erdoğan quails before Fifa’s rules.

Karpatalya, or Carpathian Ruthenia, is a Hungarian-speaking enclave, known to historians as the shortest-lived state in history. It declared itself independent from Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 and was annexed by Hungary the next day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tibet clear the ball during their match against Abkhazia. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Guardian

It is now in Ukraine, which tries to stop the people speaking their own language. Or so their only visible supporters, two passing Hungarians, told the locals on the terraces, who were themselves the kind of affable, mildly eccentric types that somehow gravitate towards non-league grounds. They went to a football match and a geopolitics lesson broke out. The World Football Cup is like that.

It is a biennial event and this is its third rendition. There had been a predecessor body to Conifa but it collapsed in 2010. The leading lights in its revival were Per-Anders Blind, a referee (he makes the joke first – “I’m the blind ref”) who is a Sami from Swedish Lapland, and Sascha Düerkop, a German football shirt collector who, having completed the Fifa set, was working his way through the non-Fifa teams and thus had the best contacts.

Conifa has 47 members, 16 of whom qualified for this tournament which, in a strange, very Conifa way, is theoretically not taking place in London at all. The official host is Barawa, a small port in southern Somalia with its own culture and language – closer to Swahili than Somali. But Somalia’s troubles mean the Barawa FA is now based in London.

At Bromley on Thursday evening, after the official opening ceremony, the Barawans played and mashed Tamil Eelam, representing Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, who struggled on the unfamiliar artificial turf. But the parade beforehand was competitive, if haphazard. The Matabeles, who crowdfunded their journey, were notably joyful. There was a lone flagbearer from Western Sahara, which does not actually have a team here, but hey, this is Conifa. Cascadia marched behind a flagbearer wearing a bow tie and boater. “Who’s oppressing the Cascadians?” I asked him. “Anyone who harms the planet,” he replied.

There was the team from Tuvalu, the tiny Pacific island group that would be eligible for Fifa except, according to the Tuvalu FA president, Soseala Tinilau, that they do not have enough stadium or hotel capacity. Fifa membership brings money. But they need money to qualify for membership. Milo Minderbinder would understand.

But the Tibetans marched first and a plangent Tibetan band provided the pre-match entertainment. Tragedy is never far from the surface at Conifa. Tamil Eelam suffered a long and bloody civil war, as did Matabeleland. The tournament generates opposition too. A few Georgians turned up at Enfield to object to the separatist Abkhazians; the (Greek) Cypriot government wrote to Enfield council to try to thwart their Turkish neighbours.

The Chinese work more subtly to suppress Tibetan nationalism. There is one main sponsor for the tournament, the bookmakers Paddy Power, a firm that relishes the original. There would have been others, says the organiser, Paul Watson. “We were talking to several firms about sponsorship that would have totalled six figures. But at quite a late stage they each came to us and said: ‘Um, yes, but you have to take Tibet out.’ We’d underestimated the difficulty of coming up against China and the Fifa network.”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“Obviously we refused to comply,” said Watson.

“Obviously?”

“If we haven’t got our principles, what are we?” The same as everyone else in football, one might say.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abkhazian players meet their fans. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Guardian

Beforehand, the Tibetans found that potential practice games in Germany suddenly dematerialised. And their UK visas, though they came through in the end, were held up for two months.

This tournament makes one think hard about what we mean by nationality as a concept, as Britain has had to do twice in the past four years, over the Scottish referendum and then Brexit. If Yorkshire really wanted independence then, in the end, it would have to have it. The same is true for Catalonia (not members of Conifa) and the Québécois (who are).

But elsewhere in the world it does not work that way. “We don’t refer to teams as countries,” says Watson. “We call them members. They are effectively identities. What links them is that their identity is expressed by their own labels and not the countries they belong to.

“Countries are often just historic flukes. One broad stroke on a map and a peace treaty a hundred years ago. Does that make a country? We don’t claim to have the answer but it’s worth asking the question.”

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Blind, now Conifa’s president, admits these matters are becoming problematic. Some frivolous applications are being rejected: the North Sea fort of Sealand, once a pirate radio station, was brushed aside. “We have stopped chasing new members because we are getting applicants every month,” he says. “The latest are the Albanians living in Greece.

“Maybe we will have to change, have different categories of membership. But we are one human race and here we have a global platform for the people of the world. Football is a tool for people to express themselves because it’s a universal language.”

Conifa also offers a testbed for footballing ideas. The referees are armed with green cards as well as red and yellow ones. These are derived from black cards, as used in Gaelic sport as a halfway house: the player is sent off but can be replaced, so the team as a whole is not punished. Mark Clattenburg, the former Premier League referee, who puts himself about and will handle the final next Saturday, agreed the experiment with Paddy Power.

If top-level referees do need a third option, I would vote for summary execution myself. But perhaps it is the right course here where proximity could breed a sense of collegiality unknown to modern professionals. These players are staying together in a four-to-a-room hostel in north London. Improbable friendships may arise. Those at the most put-upon end of the spectrum may discover young men from very different places whose experiences and cultural yearnings and sense of displacement match their own.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Matabeleland squad dance and sing as they parade round the pitch before the Barawa v Tamil Eelam game. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Guardian

I hope they have fun too. The presence of Paddy Power means there is even a betting market. Ellan Vannin – the Isle of Man – have been made 13-8 favourites. I quite fancy the Carpathians as a longshot. Maybe their day will come. For the second time.

Maybe, though, the world does not work that way. Ragesh Nambiar, the UK-based Tamil Eelam coach, has a sideline giving talks to schools on behalf of Amnesty. One of his riffs is to stage a mock football match where he plays the role of the most biased referee imaginable. The aim is to teach kids about the unfairness of life.