As the football-industrial complex churns out ever more eyeball-aimed product, precision engineered to trigger either triumphalism or nostalgia (or both), there’s occasionally room for stories like this about Greenland’s eight team championship playoff: scrappy chronicles of big-hearted underachievers in obscure corners of the football universe. (One of them, about perennial losers American Samoa, even got turned into a feature film directed by Taika Waititi.) Could Greenland’s strugglers and strivers end up as characters in a big-screen comedy? Stranger things have happened and, after the country’s surprise arrival in the geopolitical spotlight, this might yet be the best way for outsiders to get some understanding of the place.
As it is, one of the main virtues of this film is to convey just how tough life is in the world’s largest island (an “autonomous territory”, part of the kingdom of Denmark). We see the team captain, Patrick Frederiksen (a charismatic presence and one of the documentary’s main characters), moodily hunting for seals, giant icebergs floating yards away from the edge of a football pitch, and the non-appearance of half the team for the week-long playoffs due to cancelled flights (travelling by boat takes longer, but is more reliable). The team in question is the slightly unmemorably named B-67, who hail from Greenland’s capital Nuuk; they appear to have an Old Firm-ish sort of rivalry with Nagdlunguak, from the island’s third largest town, Ilulissat. The shortness of the playing season, it is regularly pointed out, is one of the main factors hampering Greenland’s football, as there are only a few short summer weeks where the place thaws enough for outdoor matches. The aforementioned travel issues mean, moreover, it’s almost impossible to arrange games against anyone other than local sides.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the footballing powers-that-be appear reluctant to give official sanction to Greenland’s national side; they were recently turned down by Fifa’s North and Central Americas organisation Concacaf and, despite their fellow autonomous territory the Faroe Islands already being members, are no longer eligible for Uefa after a change in the rules. There seems to be plenty of enthusiasm for the game in Greenland, but possibly standards aren’t all that; some of the football on show in the elite tournament has a distinct Sunday league vibe, even if Frederiksen and his team-mate Søren Kreutzmann look pretty decent players. One thing that doesn’t get a mention is climate change (perversely, it might actually increase Greenland’s chances if warmer weather means more outside football), while the country’s slightly fractious relations with Denmark are hinted at only very obliquely. Overall, the film isn’t pulling up any roots, and perhaps doesn’t get the ending it wants; but it offers an interesting insight into the fringes of the global game.