The Isle of Man national football team is the national football team of the Isle of Man and is controlled by the Isle of Man Football Association. The team plays in a yellow and red home kit and an all navy blue away kit.
The Isle of Man are not members of FIFA or UEFA, as the Isle of Man FA are members of The Football Association (The FA), with similar status to an English county. Since they are not a member of either FIFA or UEFA, they are not eligible to enter either the World Cup or European Championship. It does not participate in these international competitions (it is a crown dependency of the UK and not a sovereign nation). The Isle of Man therefore is limited to different forms of competition.
The main competition the Isle of Man national football team takes part in is the biennial Football at the Island Games tournament. Isle of Man has won three silver medals in 1993, 1999 and 2003.
They play in the annual Celtic Nations Cup, a tournament for semi-professional and amateur national teams from the Isle of Man, Scotland, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. They won the tournament in 2000, beating Scotland 1-0 in the final, despite the Isle of Man possessing the only truly all-amateur set-up as the other teams fielded semi-professional players.
Another regular competition played in is the Steam Packet Football Festival, which usually features the Isle of Man along with lower division teams from The Football League. The Isle of Man's best result to date in the tournament, was beating Burnley F.C. 1-0 in 2000.
In the 2005-06 season, the Isle of Man national team won The FA National League System Cup, a competition for amateur teams representing the leagues at Step 7 of the National League System with a few other leagues permitted by the FA. The Isle of Man beat the Cambridgeshire Football Association County League team 4-0 in the final and represented England in the UEFA Regions' Cup.
Read more about Isle Of Man National Football Team: Selected Internationals Opponents, Squad 2009
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“She carries in the dishes,
And lays them in a row.
To an isle in the water
With her would I go.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
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—Eric Gill (1882–1940)
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“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)