Fiji played the Federated States of Micronesia and won 38-0, scoring 21 goals in the first half. Atonio Tuivuna scored 10 goals, Chris Wasasala had nine. There’s no video of the full match, but this video shows a couple of goals:
Fiji beat poor Micronesia in 38-0 in a soccer match, because sports are bad
Fiji needed to score as many goals as they possibly could against Micronesia. They scored a lot!
This is the most lopsided international soccer result in recorded history: the previous record holder was also a matchup between teams from Oceania, when Australia beat American Samoa 31-0. The new result might not count officially, since it was technically a matchup of U-23 teams and Micronesia isn’t affiliated with FIFA.
Micronesia is, obviously, pretty bad at soccer. It’s a tiny nation comprised of several islands in the south Pacific. The total population is a bit over 100,000, and that’s spread out over several islands, so it’s not even centralized. And there isn’t really a ton of land, so soccer fields are presumably scarce.
As noted up above, Micronesia isn’t a FIFA member -- in fact, they’re one of just nine fully sovereign nations not affiliated with FIFA. It doesn’t seem like their senior national team has played any games since 2003, when they played in the South Pacific Games and got walloped by Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Tahiti, and New Caledonia by a combined score of 52-0.
However, Micronesia is affiliated with the IOC, and I guess they figured they might take a shot at qualifying for the Olympics. So they assembled a U-23 team -- the first time the country has ever put one together -- and headed to Papua New Guinea for the Pacific Games, which serves as a qualifying tournament for the 2016 Olympics in Rio. However, they only managed to round up 18 guys for the tournament: every other team has 23.
If this were just a friendly matchup between the two countries, Fiji might’ve tapered off after scoring 10 goals or so. Nobody likes running up the score and embarrassing the opponent.
Fiji is in a group with Micronesia as well as Tahiti and Vanuatu. (You may remember Tahiti from their wonderful trip to the 2013 Confederations Cup.) In the first game, Tahiti beat Micronesia 30-0, because Tahiti is pretty okay at soccer and Micronesia is very bad.
Meanwhile, Fiji drew Vanuatu. This put Fiji and Vanuatu in an awkward position. If Tahiti (which is good) beats both Fiji and Vanuatu, the second-place team in the group will be decided by which one beats Micronesia by more. If you can get 38 goals on them, get 38 goals on them: it might end up mattering. Fiji’s coach, Uruguayan Juan Buzzetti, explained:
”I’m happy for the boys because we’ve done something good for the country, but at the same time I feel very bad about that. We had a benchmark set by Tahiti and as we’re playing them next we didn’t have any other options.
“After the game I apologised and they understand. You still feel bad though. They are young kids, they’re coming for the first time and if it wasn’t for the 30 goals Tahiti scored we would never have done that.”
Vanuatu plays Micronesia Tuesday. They need Fiji to lose to Tahiti **and** to beat Micronesia by at least 37 goals to advance. So, they’re gonna try to score 37 goals. And they’ll probably get close! Sorry, Micronesia. Sports are bad.
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