San Marino: The inside story on the world’s worst football team to win promotion to the 2024 Nations League | Football news
Last November in the fifth smallest country in the world, San Marino, a new exhibition was opened in the national museum showing the national football heritage called “Challenge of the Impossible”.
Within a week, staff were already planning for expansion when the lowest of all FIFA’s 210 nations completed the challenge a little faster than anyone expected.
On November 18, San Marino secured promotion from the fourth and bottom tier of the Nations League with a 3-1 win in Liechtenstein, piqued the interest of not only visitors to the Titan Museum, but also much of Europe.
Casual footballers, full-time plumbers, shop workers – and graphic designers, in the case of capped player Matteo Vitaioli – have made national news across the continent. Move over Spain, this is San Marino’s moment.
The country, which spent 20 years waiting to add to the one win it has ever recorded, collected two in just over a month to win its group ahead of Liechtenstein and Gibraltar, who held Romania and Wales earlier in 2024.
It was not necessary to warn everyone about the shocking rise of San Marino. The micro-state has already become a cult figure more widely, with a growing number of observers reveling in the wealth of a country where even scoring a goal, of which they have scored only 33 in their entire history, remains a novelty.
Much of their growing casual following has been fed by the ‘San Marino Fan Account’, which has amassed nearly 200,000 followers on X since June 2019 by posting cheekily optimistic, borderline fanatical and most consistent block capital moves during each country’s games, always adamant that San Marino’s next opponents will Marina have to pay for their last defeat.
“WE MAKE HISTORY BY WINNING THREE GAMES IN A ROW” was one such particularly enthusiastic example in November 2023, garnering more than two million views, after San Marino finished their Euro 2024 qualifying group losing every game.
Fittingly, the mysterious unnamed person behind the account was inspired to set it up because he couldn’t find anywhere else to publish English news about San Marino’s fortunes.
“I’m interested in soccer micro-states, but San Marino has always had and still has a special place in my heart,” he says. Sky Sports. “When San Marino scores, I usually get about 5,000 extra followers.
“He doesn’t get much if any recognition from the country. But that’s fine, the players have to concentrate on making the nation proud. X isn’t a thing in Italy or San Marino, so I think they hardly understand the love they’re getting online.”
With the jubilant tweets that usually accompany those consolation goals, or if they were very lucky, the occasional goalless draw, nobody inside or outside the country was prepared for any real success.
In four games between September and November, San Marino claimed their first ever competitive win, added a second with their debut away win and enjoyed their finest hour in November in Liechtenstein, cruising to a 3-1 victory to send the biggest shocker ever through a country slightly larger than Middlesbrough.
“It’s a wonderful feeling after all those years of defeat,” says the staunch Vitaioli Sky Sportsstill emotional almost a month later. “We got a hero’s welcome in San Marino. It was amazing.”
At 17, he became the youngest player in San Marino’s history in 2007 and is now the team’s elder statesman at 35 after 103 games, 97 losses, five draws and, after a five-minute cameo at the end of that game in Liechtenstein, one win – almost his entire career in the making.
“It’s something so big for us that maybe we still haven’t realized what actually happened,” he adds. “It is a return for all the sacrifices we have made all these years.
“We knew we were playing well, but to get promoted to the next league – that was still a dream. But sometimes dreams do come true, especially if you never give up.”
All the manifestation in San Marino could not realize the dream of a country by itself. Two hundred and fifty miles away from the Pope’s home, the divine intervention felt a more realistic support. Or, it turns out, UEFA.
The governing body’s brainchild, the League of Nations, leveled the playing field for smaller countries, and not before time.
In the two qualifying tournaments before the inaugural competition launched in 2018, the Sammarinese conceded 90 goals and scored three times in 20 games, picking up their only draw against Estonia.
But this new platform alone cannot explain their rise. The San Marino League of Nations group four years ago also contained Liechtenstein and Gibraltar, and they finished last with two draws and two defeats. They conceded only three times, but did not score a single goal themselves.
The main roots of their moment in the sun stretch back a decade to UEFA-funded infrastructure investment, including a generational redevelopment of the national stadium and a new center for the San Marino Academy, which manages youngsters up to U19 level. Seven of San Marino’s newest team have graduated.
“UEFA’s support was crucial,” San Marino FA president Marco Tura said after the Nations League triumph. “He changed our mentality and vision of football.
“UEFA has guided us in every step of our organizational and technical development, enabling us to raise the level of football not only economically, but also structurally and technically.”
One thing that UEFA could not offer was the right manager to take advantage of the brightest young players the country has ever produced.
Fabrizio Costantini has put in a lot of work since making the switch from the U21s to the national team in 2022, significantly reducing the average age of the squad and briefly equalizing against Denmark last October before Yussuf Poulsen’s winner avoided the biggest shock and a broken caps lock.
His successor, Roberto Cevoli, took things to new heights, naming the youngest average international squad across Europe in 2024.
The rewards didn’t take long to bear fruit with 24-year-old Nicolo Nanni the standout star of this Nations League campaign, hitting a last-minute penalty to draw at Gibraltar in their penultimate game before scoring to complete the turnaround in Vaduz last month.
“All credit goes to the managerial approach,” adds Vitaioli. “He was a real breath of fresh air and brought new motivation to the team.”
In all likelihood, this will be just as well for the Sammarinese, with Albania, Finland and potentially Slovakia – all sides that have qualified for recent competitions – awaiting them in League C of the 2026/27 Nations League.
Until then, there is still a chance as slim as the country itself that a place at the 2026 World Cup could be on the cards.
The four Nations League group winners who finish outside the top two in their World Cup qualifying groups will be added to a play-off next November for one of the four places in the final.
There’s a real chance San Marino are among them, although winning two more games to reach the USA, Canada and Mexico is little more than a pipe dream. But then – that’s how they got here in the first place.
