I absolutely love the San Marino national team and everything to do with the place so I’ve been wondering this - why is their team so bad?
The obvious answer is because of the size of the country. Only around 30,000 people. This explains why they are so much worse than most teams, but then I’ve got to looking at the records of other teams with similar populations. Both Gibraltar and Liechtenstein are also very bad (see 14-0 yesterday) and have similar populations, yet are considerably better than San Marino.
San Marino have got one solitary win in their history. One. Liechtenstein have 15. Gibraltar have eight and they were only admitted FIFA 10 years ago!! Gibraltar and Liechtenstein generally beat San Marino comfortably too.
It seems just impossible that San Marino are as bad as they are. Things seem to be improving, but not by much.
Another answer is that Liechtenstein and Gibraltar both have wider diasporas to pick good players from which is somewhat true with a lot of dual British/Spanish players for Gibraltar and Swiss/German/Austrian for Liechtenstein. Still, San Marino, do you draw on their Italian diaspora. It’s not like they can’t produce good players, the first captain Massimo Bonini won the Champions League with Juventus!!
Another theory I’ve seen is the relative leagues strengths. Gibraltar has a well set up football league and a lot of British players. Liechtenstein has Vaduz playing in the Swiss second division. San Marino also had a team in the Serie C not long ago! There is plenty of football culture in San Marino and the game is loved - i saw more football there than in Liechtenstein or Gibraltar.
It’s not like they don’t care about football - they absolutely do and their culture is full of it.
None of these explanations can describe how bad is San Marino are and I cannot either. Anyone else care to guess?
Tbh the small population thing makes sense, but you’ve gotta wonder why some of the countries w the biggest population are ass at international football too, looking at India and China. China is certainly better than the mentioned small countries but still significantly underperforms as expected of their population. India focuses on cricket so kinda understandable ig
India focused traditionally more on Cricket and Hockey although football is gaining in popularity.
You just explained yourself
Didn’t Gibraltar get smashed 14-0 yesterday? Not criticising them but suggests small countries with limited pools of players just have a huge disadvantage naturally
They did. That’s a real outlier though. Getting a man sent off after 18 minutes against arguably the best team in the world away from home will have an impact.
San Marino have lost 13-0, 11-0, 10-0 (twice), 10-1, and 9-0 (four occasions).
Gibraltar have lost 7-0 four time, and 8-1 once. Most of those were in 2016-2018, in their earlier days of competitive matches.
Yesterday’s result was a slightly freak score. It’s all relatively speaking, but any team can have day off (Liverpool 7-0 Man Utd; Brazil 1-7 Germany; Man Utd 8-2 Arsenal). It’s just that a Gibraltar’s bad result in an extra 6-7 goals on top of these.
Surely the nation where an East Italian musician bought Flo Rida onto the stage at Eurovision could recruit more east Italian castoff footballers, eg at Sassuolo, Rimini, Padova etc
What’s an east Italian?
Gibraltar fifa ranking is 198 idk if they play in asian can they have a better ranking cus europe is full with strong team (sr for my bad english)
being italians, they shuld be decent
I looked up their demographics a little bit. Of that 30,000 only 2,000 are male between 15-24 years old, another 6,000 are male between 25-54 but most of those are older than 35. They only have about 3,000-3,500 males between 15-35 to choose from, and from them not all might be capable to play or even want to play.