While preparations for the Olympic tournament this summer are in full swing, next week will feature another international competition fighting for recognition. Kicking off next Tuesday, the 2024 Conifa Women’s World Cup will be the second edition of the tournament, organised by the governing body that brings together non-Fifa affiliated teams.
FA Sápmi, a football association representing the Sámi people indigenous to a vast stretch of northern Scandinavia, will be the hosts. The tournament will be held over five days in Bodø, the northern Norwegian city that is this year’s European capital of culture.
At Conifa’s first women’s World Cup, held in 2022, the Sápmi team travelled to northern India for a double-header of matches against a squad of Tibetan exiles, winning 22-1 on aggregate. This year, the two teams will be joined by Székely Land – the Hungarian-speaking population of Transylvania, in Romania – and a diaspora team representing Tamil Eelam.
Marja Sofe Holmestrand Hætta was part of the squad in India and also took part in Conifa’s first international women’s match in 2018, between Sápmi and Northern Cyprus. The goalkeeper has been involved with the Sámi setup for almost 15 years, since she was a teenager.
“Every time I get the call, it’s a big honour,” she tells Moving the Goalposts and points out that this year’s tournament has already received more media attention than their trip to northern India and could provide a platform for greater recognition: “It’s good that the other Norwegians will be able to see that we’re here – look at us.”
The 29-year-old lives in the south of Norway – as is the case for most of the squad – and plays for the Kristiansund-based side Våg FK in the fourth tier. “I’m very excited to see what happens here, and afterwards.
“I don’t think many people know that we have a Sápmi national team. I live in southern Norway, and when I told my friends that I’m going to represent Sámi in a world championship, they would ask me: ‘What is that?’”
The FA Sápmi head coach, Elin Nicolaisen, says: “Marja is very proud of her identity. She wears the national Sámi dress and when she puts on the captain’s armband and the national anthem plays she gets very emotional.”
The captain will be wearing a Gákti – the traditional Sámi outfit that is nowadays reserved for special occasions – during the opening ceremony next week, as she also did when she represented Sápmi in the Arctic Winter games.
Nicolaisen, a former Norwegian top-flight player, set out to create a women’s team when she joined FA Sápmi in 2014, an initiative first championed by the longtime president, Håkan Kuorak. She is optimistic about the team’s chances of retaining the title, but the scheduling of the tournament – midway through the Norwegian league season – means she is unable to call up any first division players who could be eligible.
The value in Conifa’s international tournaments, according to Nicolaisen, lies especially in the opportunities for cultural exchange between the teams. The most enriching part of the 2022 trip, she says, were the discussions her players had with their Tibetan counterparts, when they compared their vastly differing stages of recognition in their respective homelands.
If logistical hurdles and inherent political complications hinder the organisation’s work in men’s football, those struggles are amplified in the women’s game. The Conifa president, Per-Anders Blind, who is of Sámi origin, says that women’s football within the organisation “is still in a development phase”. With the notable exception of the Sápmi setup, women’s teams are ostensibly an afterthought for many participants – “they are the marginalised within the marginalised” as the former referee puts it.
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While Blind laments that some members are not as “serious” about their women’s teams – he cites the last-minute withdrawals that led to the tournament next week going from six teams to four – he is nevertheless confident growth will come eventually. “It’s important for us to convince our members that we need to invest in women, and create equal tournaments,” he says.
Norma Álvarez, Conifa’s director for women’s football, runs a regionalised amateur women’s league in Mexico. With a lack of resources and recurring visa issues preventing even continental competitions from taking place, Álvarez hopes that next week’s tournament will be a catalyst for a change in fortunes: “Our intention is to keep supporting women’s football, so that in five or six years we see a truly worldwide tournament with 12, 16 teams, which would be amazing for Conifa.”
Beyond this summer, the organisation hopes to expand into youth football and futsal competitions, all the while staging its first men’s World Cup since 2018 (this year’s edition, which was set to be held in Iraqi Kurdistan, was cancelled). The hope in Bodø is that the organisation’s first major tournament since then will provide a much-needed platform for both the Conifa project and women’s football among its member associations.
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