Author Paul Watson treks to the ends of the Earth in search of football's obscure tales
Paul Watson is not your standard football traveller. Not for him a groundhop to the Isthmian League or to see a fallen giant in Flanders. This is a man who washed up on the tiny island of Pohnpei in Micronesia to coach the national XI, founded a football team in Outer Mongolia and worked as a consultant for a club in Bhutan high in the Himalayas.
“Rest assured,” Watson rest assures the reader at the departure point of his latest book, Around the World in 80 Clubs, “We are taking in the whole world, from the Arctic to Tahiti…”
This Foggian approach to his long-awaited follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Up Pohnpei (“Isn’t that what they normally recommend, take 14 years to write your second?”) was, suitably, a team effort. His agent perhaps wisely surmising that a weighty tome about the game in Outer Mongolia might have been “very niche”, he and Watson came up with a concept and a structure that have resulted in this entertaining cornucopia of snippets, yarns and football exotica.
“I’d already been to Greenland, San Marino, Alderney, Moldova… I’ve got quite a history of going to far-flung places. After my first book about coaching on a tiny island in Micronesia, when I went back into journalism, my whole speciality was obscure, travel-based pieces.”
“As they say, find the thing you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. There are times when I’ve thought, if only the thing that I loved was compliant structures or legal documents, and then I could make proper money. On the other hand, I feel very lucky because it’s really a unique thing to be doing.”
We should state here that not all the events described here unfolded under the watchful eye of this likeable Canada-born fortysomething, a regular guest on the Guardian’s stratospherically popular Football Weekly podcast. Few outsiders would have witnessed the Rothera British Antarctic Survey team taking on their counterparts on the HMS Protector or Rapa Nui of Easter Island welcoming record champions Colo-Colo in the Chilean Cup.
This, in turn, does allow the writer to muse that a derby for Rapa Nui would be against the Pitcairn Islands 1,300 miles away, except that the infamous British Overseas Territory is “possibly one of the few places on Earth never to have heard the thud of a football being kicked”. Obviously Fletcher Christian’s mutineers weren’t thinking straight when they set sail for parts unknown.
Watson would almost certainly have packed a football, along with potable water and ship’s biscuits. “As an everyday traveller. I’ve lost track of the number of places where I’ve just showed up, and been granted access in a way that wouldn’t happen otherwise. You might meet a football team and one of the players will show you to where they work or take you back to their family – it’s amazing how much you’re allowed in, especially at lower levels. Because I deal with quite obscure football, it’s not like you’re showing up to a Champions League match. You’re getting access to the players that isn’t just clichéd soundbites through a press desk.”
“At so many places I went, people were so kind, whether they were fans or people at the club – it gives you a window, an insight, into a completely different set of cultures that I wouldn’t have sat down and learned about at home. Greenlandic hunting traditions, for example. You can these amazing little snapshots into different worlds. That’s what I’ve always loved about football, although this is a sport that seems very simple, in a way.”
“Almost everything I’ve learned about the world – how people live, politics – it’s usually through the veil of football. That’s what I love – through travel and football, you can open doors that you can’t really do otherwise.”
There’s access and then there’s access. Paul Watson might be the UK’s only football journalist to whom the Vatican sends its weekly round-up of local results, for example. This is the kind of non-FIFA football the writer himself supported when organising the CONIFA World Football Cup around London for teams representing places whose number is never in the hat when it comes to World Cup qualifying.
You’ll never see the world’s media descend on Tibetan goalkeepers or random Tuvalu goalscorers – these are football’s hidden corners, the ones that have Watson reaching for his passport: “I’m always most excited by the places I haven’t been, so I love the planning phase. I’m constantly planning places I want to go to. There’s almost nowhere where I’ve seem someone’s been that I don’t want to go to, like I’m jealous of everyone who’s travelling, especially in a football sense. While the world might be small it’s also very big – there are always millions of football games going on somewhere”.
“But I do find when I’m actually doing it, I get such as rush from the travel itself. And most people say that they dread the writing-up, which I do feel a bit. But this is a load of stories I’ve been really excited about wanting to tell for so long, I was quite glad to get them out, a purge, to get these stories out, finally. The only thing that damn near killed me was the fact-checking!”
As for his favourite tale of the 80, Watson turns his gaze to the Indian Ocean: “I love the Seychelles story, about the holidaymaker who was accidentally made their national manager. Andy Morrison was just there on vacation – he is a football coach but he’s a kind of trainer at community level who gets made their national manager as they believe him to be Andrew Morrison, the ex-Manchester City defender. These little stories…”
Around the World in 80 Clubs by Paul Watson, Orion Books, £16.99
