The Vatican City national football team (Italian: Selezione di calcio della Città del Vaticano) is the football team that represents Vatican City. They are one of only eight fully recognised sovereign states whose national team is not a FIFA member. The others are Monaco, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Marshall Islands and Palau. The football association of Vatican City was founded in 1972. The current president of the FA is Sergio Valci. The team has been managed by Giovanni Trapattoni in the past.
In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II established a Vatican sports department to "reinvigorating the tradition (of sport) within the Christian community". In the past Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone suggested that the Vatican could field a team of men from catholic seminaries. About the prospect, the cardinal stated, "If we just take the Brazilian students from our Pontifical universities we could have a magnificent squad." The cardinal also noted that in the 1990 FIFA World Cup, there were 42 players in the final round who attended Salesian training centers worldwide.
Read more about Vatican City National Football Team: Overview, Kit, The Vatican's Stance On Football
Famous quotes containing the words football team, city, national, football and/or team:
“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)
“The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“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)