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On Wednesday evening the San Marino national football team will face Saint Kitts and Nevis, a Caribbean archipelago which is one of the smallest and least populous states in the world, in a friendly match. For San Marino it is a great opportunity: despite being even smaller and less populous than Saint Kitts and Nevis, its football team is definitely in better form than its opponent and is considered favourites. For the first time in a long time San Marino seems to have concrete hopes of winning a match, which would be only the second in its history: the first was twenty years ago, in April 2004, a historic 1-0 at home against Liechtenstein in a friendly match.
San Marino is an independent republic of just 61 square kilometers and just under 34 thousand inhabitants. It is located within Italian territory, between Emilia-Romagna and Marche, and for this reason in Italy the few times in which its national team manages to achieve a result other than losing both-to-zero they are always quite noticed and commented on, also because of a certain charm that in sport always has those who start from conditions of great disadvantage, overturning the predictions. Due to the small size of the state, the San Marino national team is made up mostly of semi-professionals, who at best play in the lower Italian leagues and are often amateurs who have other jobs and play football as a hobby. In the FIFA ranking, the ranking of the national teams periodically made by the body that governs world football, San Marino is currently in position 210 out of 210, last.
The goals scored by San Marino in the 200 matches played by its national team are so few, 31, that it is easy for the fans to remember them all, as well as the 9 draws in its history, 8 of which arrived with a result of 0-0 (l ‘other is a 1-1). However, an important narrative has been built around the only victory in these twenty years for the San Marino people, who link an important part of their patriotic spirit to the national football team. “What made it really special was that we didn’t expect it,” he said al Guardian Simone Bacciocchi, former defender who in 2004 was 27 years old when he was part of the team that won that match against Liechtenstein.
Even though it has a population comparable to that of San Marino, Liechtenstein has always had a much better tradition in international matches and in those years had stronger and better known players, such as the former Siena striker Mario Frick: for this reason that victory was unexpected. “There was no big celebration,” Bacciocchi said. “The simple fact of being able to walk off the pitch after 90 minutes as winners, for the first time, was the best way we could celebrate.”
The goal of that match was scored by striker Andy Selva in the sixth minute from a free kick. Selva, born in Rome to a mother from San Marino, was one of the best players ever for the national team and with 8 goals he was also its best scorer. He was a free kick specialist, with which he scored half of his goals for the national team. In an interview after that match Mario Frick, who played in Serie A and was well known in Italy, said of him: «He could also play in Serie B». A few years later Selva actually arrived in Serie B, with Sassuolo and only for one year, the best moment of his career.
The match won against Liechtenstein was a friendly match, but for San Marino it had enormous sporting value, because it was in a certain sense the testimony that the existence of its national team had a sporting as well as symbolic meaning.
In a football in which professional footballers have to play more and more matches, and therefore with an ever-increasing risk of injuries and fatigue, the usefulness of involving San Marino and other national teams from very small states in international competitions, as they almost always lose. San Marino, for example, plays in both the qualifiers for the European Championships and those for the World Cup, even if it has never even come close to qualifying, and this has also created some controversies in the past: in 2016 for example, after an 8-0 defeat against Germany, the German national team player Thomas Müller these that “matches like the one against San Marino have nothing to do with professional football”, that they were useless and only risked causing injuries to professional footballers like him.
The San Marino national team He answered with an ironic but also very piqued list of the reasons why that match made sense according to San Marino, in a letter that began by saying: «Dear Thomas Müller, you are right. Games like the one on Friday night are useless. To you”.
The history of San Marino’s results in qualifying for international competitions: none
Since the match won against Liechtenstein in these twenty years the San Marino national team has played 137 matches and has only been ahead in a match once, for 6 minutes against Malta in 2012 (in the end Malta won 3-2).
For some time now, however, the San Marino national team has had some reason to hope. In November 2022 the team achieved its first ever draw with goals, a 1-1 draw in a friendly against Saint Lucia (another Caribbean island state), which came with a goal in the final minutes from midfielder Lorenzo Lazzari. Above all, in the last three matches played in the qualifiers for the European Championships between October and November last year San Marino always scored: they only lost 2-1 against a strong national team like Denmark and tried until the end to equalize in a very ambitious way , then 3-1 against Kazakhstan and 2-1 against Finland.
Saint Kitts and Nevis, on the other hand, despite having a higher FIFA ranking than San Marino (it is 147th), comes from a last match played in November against modest Guadeloupe – a French overseas department – and lost 5- 0. For once there is at least the certainty that San Marino will play it to win and not to try to draw 0-0, as they almost always do. Lorenzo Capicchioni, 22-year-old midfielder for the San Marino national team, told the Guardian that «this time it will be completely different, because we will have to try to score and take the lead».
– Read also: Everything you’ll never need to know about Saint Kitts and Nevis