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The isolated Pacific nation is trying to build its first football team amid a battle for survival against rising sea levels
The Marshall Islands, an isolated sprawl of atolls covering 750,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean but home to barely 42,000 people, may be the final frontier for the world’s most popular sport. It claims to be the last country on Earth without a football team, and to this day, the islands have never hosted an 11-a-side game.
Until recently, football was an alien concept in a nation occupied by the US since the second world war, with baseball and basketball the traditional sports. As interest has grown in recent years, another barrier has emerged. Land has always been at a premium on these fragile shores, but never more than now with rising sea levels bringing fears of permanent flooding.
The ocean around these islands has risen by 3.4mm a year since 1993, more than twice the worldwide average. A total rise of one metre would leave the most populous atolls ravaged by permanent inundations; any more than that, and the Marshall Islands could be wiped from the map. The country’s first full-size football pitch, built for last year’s Micronesian Games, was only approved with the proviso that it would also act as a sea defence on the most populous atoll, Majuro.
This remote area of the Pacific has a history marked by environmental atrocities. The Marshall Islands were the site of more than 60 US-led nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, with over a third taking place on the most infamous atoll, Bikini. Serious health issues that linger from that era, and the fear of a future blighted by floods, have meant the expatriate population has more than doubled since 2010. More Marshallese people now live abroad than at home.
In the midst of this precarious situation, the Marshall Islands’ first football federation was set up in 2020 with the aim of growing the game sustainably. A small group of people have been recruited, tasked with building a team, coaching youngsters and promoting the islands’ plight. Many of them, like the commercial director, Matt Webb, and the men’s first-team coach, Lloyd Owers, are based in the UK, 8,000 miles away.
Having read an article about the mission to build the first Marshallese football team, Webb contacted the federation president, Shem Levi, to offer his services for free. “He set up the FA because his son was getting into football,” Webb says, adding that Levi initially took some convincing. “In the end, he said: ‘What’s the worst you can do? Go ahead and do your thing.’”
For Webb, Owers and others including Katie Smith, recently made the Marshall Islands’ first women’s team coach, that has involved globetrotting to run coaching sessions while working hard to boost the nascent team’s online profile. “How do you get from absolute zero to competing in World Cup qualifiers?” Webb asks. “We don’t get any external funding, so we’ve been reliant on grants, donations and merchandise sales.”
The shirt caught fans’ attention when launched online, before something strange started to happen. In each picture posted on social media, scraps of the shirt disappeared in what was a starkly clear message. “Existentially the country faces a huge crisis with climate change,” Webb says. “We wanted to make something which is both a celebration of the country, but also drawing attention to the fact there’s a very real threat…”