The South Ossetian national team will go to the CONIFA World Cup. The tournament will be held in Northern Macedonia from May 30 to June 7, according to the Committee on Youth Policy, Sports and Tourism of the Republic.
“The Confederation of Independent Football Associations on its official website has
announced that 16 teams have entered the championship. Of these, only 5 teams will represent Europe. Among them, last year's European champion is the South Ossetian national team. According to the results of the draw, our team fell into group “D”. The representative of the North American continent, Cascadia, will perform in this group. According to Wikipedia, more than 15 million people live in this region, "the committee notes.
The third team of the group is the Asian team - United Koreans in Japan. The Korean diaspora in Japan totals more than 700 thousand people. And the fourth team that fell into this group was the team from the African continent Darfur United. Darfur is located in the west of Sudan. Its population is more than 7 million people.
The South Ossetian team has already met with the Darfur team. The meeting was held in 2014 as part of the World Cup, which was held in Ostersund, Sweden. Then our team defeated the opponent with a score of 19: 0. Now, of course, Darfur footballers will be better prepared.
Unfortunately, the team of the fraternal republic of Abkhazia will not take part in the championship. According to the Vice-President of CONIFA Dmitry Pagva, because of the low rating, the Abkhaz team could not get into the world championship. According to him, those teams that took first or second place in the last tournaments of organizations, as well as those that spent the greatest number of qualifying games, go to the championship.
CONIFA is the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, established in 2013. It was founded to promote the development of international football in non-FIFA regions.
CONIFA consists of 58 football federations, representing 409 million people.
The South Ossetian team first took part in the tournament under the auspices of CONIFA in 2014. Then in the Swedish city of Ostersund the world championship was held. In 2017, South Ossetia fought for the European Championship Cup, which took place in Northern Cyprus. Two years later, the South Ossetian team won the European Championship in Nagorno-Karabakh.
