Throughout its history, the center of Catholics throughout the world, the Vatican apparently has links with football. How can a number of the world’s top footballers visit the city several times and meet with the leaders of world Catholics.
The historical record as reported by thesefootballtimes.co said that the first soccer match that took place at the Vatican occurred on January 7, 1521. The match was even attended by the leader of the Catholic community at that time, Pope Leo XI.
Despite the status of a city state, the Vatican may be proud of the affairs of managing their football league. Because they have their own league that is not related to the stage of the Italian Serie A, things are different if we look at the same tiny area with the Vatican, Monaco for example, who are members of the French Ligue 1.
Is Campionato Vaticano in Calcio, Vatican football league, this league has started rolling since 1985. Then in 2007, the format was changed to follow the development of modern football. This league alone can only be attended by employees at the Vatican.
In the 2014 season there were 7 teams competing to be the best at the end of the season. The team that competed consisted of employees such as the Swiss Guard, Vatican museum guards, newspaper merchants, police and so on. Champion in the 2014 season was won by the Musei Vaticani team. This title is the second title of the team. While for the top scorer business was also won by the mainstay attacker Musei Vaticani, Quarta. Quarta Suskes scored 19 goals in the 2014 season.
Whereas last season, the club whose majority were medical workers at the Vatican hospital, OPBG won the title. Trained by a duo of coaches Dino Pantaleoni and Carmine Picariello, OPBG was able to sit at the top of the standings last season 3 points adrift of runners-up, Dirtel Team.
Not unlike the football league in other countries, the Vatican League itself applies rules not much different from the transfer policy, to the composition of players. What’s interesting is the rules on the composition of players, a team consisting of Garda Swiis, Guardia Svizzera F.C. got a slightly different rule.
Mentioned in the Vatican League regulations in effect last season, each team competing with minimla has 16 players and a maximum of 25 players, but for Guardia Svizzera F.C. get an exception.
In addition, the team can also cross it out when the league takes place if the player has a serious injury, the team can replace it with another player as long as he hasn’t registered with another team. But for the wisdom of the goalkeeper, each team in the Vatican League can register at any time until the competition ends.
But the striking difference from the Vatican League is the duration of the match. Each match in the Vatican League only lasts 50 minutes with 1 round only playing for 25 minutes with an additional maximum time of only 5 minutes. Besides that, in the Vatican League regulation, one team can be considered as losing the WO if there are less than 6 players in the squad competition. This WO rule is made to anticipate the disruption of the main work of the players of each team.
Although it has a self-managed league, for the national team’s affairs, don’t expect more from the Vatican National Team. Until now, the Vatican is not a member of FIFA. The Vatican national team made its international debut in 1994. At that time they competed against San Marino. On the debut match, Vatican Suskes won a positive result by holding a San Marino draw without a goal.
Since then, the Vatican has been more against countries that are not members of FIFA such as Monaco or Catalan. Since 1994 until last playing in 2011, the Vatican national team has played 7 times. The inability of the Vatican national team player actually became a thought with a number of the world’s great coaches. Several years ago, former Italian national team coach Giovanni Trapattoni had expressed interest in being able to train the Vatican national team if he later retired from the coach. Today the Vatican is trained by Gianfranco Guadagnoli.
Despite being a country outside FIFA, the Vatican has the advantage of delivering scathing criticism to the highest football organization. Some time ago, the Vatican expressly expressed their dislike of the FIFA scandal. Deputy Pontifical council for culture and director of the Vatican council’s culture and sports division, Monsignor Melchor Sanchez de Toca, as quoted from washingtontimes.com, criticized the occurrence of FIFA’s high-ranking corruption scandal,
“Sports like football are disrupted because of this big crime. Football must be clean of dirty hands.” said Monsignor Melchor Sanchez de Toca.
Not limited to criticism, the Vatican even made a decision to postpone donations to FIFA until the investigation into the FIFA scandal ended. The Vatican, although not a member, is also active in providing financial donations aimed at developing football in third world countries.
ASL
