No Football Stadium – fight ice and snow to play beautiful sports in Greenland | Video

AIn the football industry they produce many things that only catch the eye, which are precisely designed to trigger victory or ambition (or both), sometimes there are stories like this one about the Greenland eight-team competition: the stories of the greats in the obscure corners of football. (One of them, approx the eternal losers of American Samoaeven modified a film produced by Taika Waititi.) Could the Greenland wrestlers be characters in the main drama? Stranger things have happened and, after that the sudden arrival of the country in the geopolitical spotlightthis can be the best way for foreigners to understand this place.

As it is, one of the main advantages of the film is to show how difficult life is on the world’s largest island (“independent territory”, part of the kingdom of Denmark). We see the captain of the team, Patrick Frederiksen (a charismatic presence and one of the main characters), the passionate hunt for seals, the giants floating far from the edge of the football field, and the absence of half the team for a week’s games due to flight cancellations (traveling by boat takes longer, but it lasts longer). The group in question is a slightly less memorable one called B-67, who hails from the Greenland capital of Nuuk; they seem to have an Old Firm-ish rivalry with Nagdlunguak, from the island’s third town, Ilulissat. The shortness of the playing season, it is always said, is one of the main factors that hinders football in Greenland, since there are only a few weeks of summer when the ground thaws enough for outdoor sports. The aforementioned means that, it is impossible to fix a game with anyone other than local parties.

It is not surprising that the football authorities seem reluctant to punish the Greenlandic side; they were recently was rejected by FIFA in North and Central America Concacaf and, although their self-governing part of the Faroe Islands is already a member, they are no longer eligible for Uefa after the constitutional change. Apparently there is a lot of interest in the game in Greenland, but maybe the standards are not all; some of the matches shown in the top flight have a familiar Sunday vibe, although Frederiksen and his teammate Søren Kreutzmann look good players. One thing that is not mentioned is global warming (perversely, it could increase Greenland’s chances if the warm weather means outdoor football), while the country’s slightly strained relationship with Denmark is only seen as careless. Overall, the film doesn’t take root, and it probably doesn’t end up where it wants to; but it provides an interesting insight into the fringes of international sports.