‘We Don’t Need to Play These Games’
Australia’s 31-0 victory over American Samoa in 2001 caused the victor as much embarrassment as the loser, and provoked both scorn and amusement over in Britain.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
On 11 April 2001, the Australian men’s association football team hosted American Samoa at the International Sports Stadium in Coffs Harbour, for an Oceanian qualifying round game for the following year’s World Cup in Japan and South Korea. American Samoa’s Football Association (ASFA) had learned shortly before qualification began that most of their original squad of players were ineligible for selection due to not possessing American passports (having been born in neighbouring independent Samoa).
Coach Tuona Lui therefore had to field a hastily assembled team of mostly teenagers in the qualifying tournament, which was played entirely in Australia. They lost 13-0 to Fiji and 8-0 to Samoa in the first two games. Then came their match against an Australia team who had just two days earlier set the record for the biggest win in international football history, beating Tonga 22-0. Despite Australian coach Frank Farina heavily rotating his side, they easily surpassed that milestone, defeating American Samoa 31-0 – a record that still stands to this day – with forward Archie Thompson scoring 13 goals, another record.
The result captured international attention, with American Samoa, at the very bottom of the FIFA rankings, becoming the butt of many a sportswriter’s joke. They lost 5-0 to Tonga in the remaining game to finish last in the qualifying group. Australia came top (scoring 66 goals and conceding 0 across four games), comfortably beat New Zealand 6-1 on aggregate in the second round, but then lost 3-1 on aggregate in an inter-confederation playoff against Uruguay, who’d finished fifth in the South American qualifying group. Impatience with the shortage of meaningful competition in Oceanian football and the lack of a direct qualification route eventually led to Australia departing the Oceanian Football Confederation (OFC) for the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in 2006.
As for American Samoa, the team would eventually complete a public redemption arc on 22 November 2011. Under the tutelage of Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen, they defeated Tonga 2-1 in Apia in the first round of Oceanian qualifying for the 2014 World Cup – their first-ever victory in a FIFA-recognised international fixture. Once again, the result captured international attention. A British documentary-making team covered American Samoa’s qualifying campaign (in which they narrowly failed to make the next round after a late defeat to Samoa) for the critically acclaimed Next Goal Wins (2014). Its subject matter was subsequently turned by New Zealand director Taika Waititi into a Hollywood film of the same name, released in 2023, with Michael Fassbender playing Rongen.
In the forthcoming miniseries of posts, I want to reflect on that trajectory between those two qualifying campaigns and landmark results, as it played out in contemporary global media coverage. During this time, a ruthless, inegalitarian account of the harsh realities of international football – which underpinned Australia’s eventual departure from the OFC – gave way to a more romantic, participatory narrative, as the underdog finally had its day.
The right to participate
ASFA applied unsuccessfully to the OFC to have their qualifiers postponed after the passport debacle, before eventually sending their makeshift team.1 Their arrival was so rushed that they had to purchase boots for the players once they arrived in Australia.2 Despite these difficulties, their first two inauspicious results, and the, for the most part, hardly good faith coverage of the team’s travails in the Australian press, Tuona Lui and his ASFA colleagues remained honest but equanimous about their task when interviewed. After their loss to Samoa, he insisted:
It is very hard for us, but it is also a great learning experience. This is our first World Cup series. We know how good Australia is, so all we can do is work hard, try our best and try to improve as a team. My players will not be frightened. They will go at it.3
Such sanguinity was seemingly underpinned by a broader sense of mission and realism, having only played their first FIFA-recognised international less than three years earlier. Given the strong American influence on its Pacific territories, and the potential lure of a sporting career in the US for young American Samoans, association football had previously struggled to achieve much of a foothold there. ASFA president Victor Stanley emphasised that it remained a ‘very young sport’ in the country, but that the association’s focus on youth was already bearing fruit, with 2,000 players now registered.
Maybe the World Cup has come a bit early for us, but we are going to Australia to learn. The long-term plan is to be a competitive team in the Oceania region, and we are sure we can achieve that.4
The American Samoans’ apparent serenity was also rooted in the deeply held Christian faith that the squad reportedly collectively expressed in the dressing room before and after games, and which Lui regularly gave voice to in interviews:
We are going to need some help from above. We will be asking that the Lord helps protect us and to keep us the score down. We thank him for his support because we don’t want Australia to set another world record.5
It was a resource that they were also able to draw upon in dealing with the aftermaths of heavy defeats. ‘God is the righteous one and because of him losing by so many goals does not matter,’ Lui insisted after the Australia game.6
The American Samoans remained publicly robustly positive in the face of the derision they faced thereafter, with team manager Tony Langkilde insisting ‘We are a member of FIFA and we have a right to play.’7 Just under a year later, American Samoa’s Panamanian technical manager Ismael Herrera conceded that the result had gotten to them: ‘We were frustrated, and sad, because the story went right around the world and it made us look bad.’ Yet he claimed that the severity of the defeat had perversely increased interest in the game in American Samoa, as well as encouraging American Samoan players based abroad to get in touch with the national team. Herrera insisted: ‘We are not giving up at all, and in three or four years’ time we will be competitive. I guarantee it. Because for the first time, the kids are being taught the right way.’8
Humiliation in victory
There was some sympathy for American Samoa prior to and after the game in the Australian media, given the asymmetry of the tie and the additional issues that had beset their preparations for the qualifiers. Australian journalist Michael Cockerill noted in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The question some may ask is: Why bother? But that is to presume football is only about results.’ He took seriously Lui’s and Stanley’s aspirations to use matches against stronger opponents as a learning curve.9
Yet such voices were rare amid the scorn and mockery. Patronising anecdotes about the American Samoan squad’s chaotic arrival were regurgitated in the Australian sporting press beforehand, while confusion over whether Australia had scored 31 or 32 goals, owing to a mistake on the scoreboard, was also the source of mirth. The coach’s and team’s religiosity became a further object of ridicule, a signifier of their backwardness and lack of professional preparation to participate in elite sport. Paul Millar remarked in the Australian Associated Press’s newsfeed: ‘While the Australians were working out who had scored the goals in the next room, the American Samoans were praying and singing hymns.’10
For the Australian team, the one-sided outcomes of fixtures like this brought a sense of frustration rather than accomplishment. Their biggest stars were European-based, and coaches like Glasgow Rangers’ Dick Advocaat and Coventry City’s Gordon Strachan were publicly disparaging about their players being unavailable to them while they played in highly uncompetitive qualifiers on the other side of the globe.11 While Frank Farina was dismissive of these complaints, he was also scathing in his criticism of a qualifying format that threw up ‘disgraceful and embarrassing’ one-sided games.12 His players echoed such sentiments, epitomised by Archie Thompson’s post-match remarks:
Breaking the world record is a dream come true for me – that sort of thing doesn’t come along every day. But you have to look at the teams we are playing and start asking questions. We don’t need to play these games.13
British contempt and sympathy
The response to the results in Britain confirmed their fears about such reputational damage, tapping into broader elitist sentiments in some quarters against the expansion of the international game, especially beyond its traditional European and South American strongholds. Writing for the Daily Star of Scotland, Ally Guthrie polemically queried:
Should a team, which arrived in Sydney without boots and jerseys, be permitted to compete? No! The [Scottish Premier League] wouldn’t let them anywhere near our top league. And the [Scottish Football Association] wouldn’t have them either. And you could safely wager your mortgage on the OVD Scottish Junior Cup finalists, Carnoustie Panmure and Renfrew, giving coach Tunoa Lui’s side a right tanking.14
Similarly, in his regular column for The People, Chelsea chairman Ken Bates lambasted FIFA for ‘allowing Australia to play Never-Never Land in play-off matches for World Cup rounds that shouldn’t exist,’ complaining bitterly that bottom-ranked American Samoa ‘have as much of a say in the running of the global game as England, Italy, France or Germany’.15
Yet the overall tone of British press coverage was more of amusement at American Samoa having unintentionally and briefly captured the global sporting media spotlight. The Times opined that ‘It’s not the winning that matters. It’s the losing.’ It urged American Samoa to ‘glory in their grand failure’, asserting that ‘if once they were a mere annotation in the footnotes of football, now they will go down in the annals for their trophy defeat.’16 Similarly, in his column for the Daily Mirror, Des Kelly compared the result to his own experience of a ‘wet, winter afternoon on a south London playing field when Norbury and Mitcham United lost a keenly contested match by the score of 37-0’.17
Such commentary was on the one hand heavily patronising towards American Samoa, and tapped into broader post-imperial chauvinism towards far-flung small nations: a short Daily Mirror feature published after the result, titled ‘Things You Should Knoa about American Samoa’, remarked: ‘Islanders have to rely on making their own entertainment, as there is just one TV channel and two radio stations’.18 Yet it also often spoke to an ironical, almost carnivalesque reading of football, a sense that the true meaning of the game lay in its lowest rather than highest echelons, in comedy rather than victory. It tapped into the same self-depreciating strain of humour that made apparent British sporting decline palatable, and ran counter to the increasing inequality of both domestic leagues and European competitions.
The second part in this miniseries is available here:
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
Ray Gatt, ‘Tiniest of Minnows Cause Cup Chaos’, The Australian (27 Mar. 2001).
Paul Millar, ‘Socceroos Prepare while American Samoans Shop for Boots’, AAP Newsfeed (6 Apr. 2001).
Quoted in Michael Lynch, ‘Samoans Seek Help to Resist Big Island’, The Age (11 Apr. 2001).
Quoted in Michael Cockerill, ‘No-Hope Nation’s Game for a Lesson’, Sydney Morning Herald (16 Mar. 2001).
Quoted in David Lewis, ‘Lord’s Prayer for God Squad’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney) (11 Apr. 2001).
Quoted in Paul Millar, ‘American Samoa’s Prayers not Answered’, AAP Newsfeed (11 Apr. 2001).
Quoted in David McKay and Jeff Dunne, ‘It’s a Game of Two Halves...16 at Half-Time, 15 Thereafter’, The Times (26 Apr. 2001).
Quoted in Michael Cockerill, ‘How Losing 31-0 Inspired a Generation of Samoans into Taking up the Game’, Sydney Morning Herald (17 Jan. 2002).
Cockerill, ‘No-Hope Nation’s Game for a Lesson’.
Millar, ‘American Samoa’s Prayers not Answered’.
Tim Gordon, ‘Aussies Move Angers Dick’, Daily Mirror (10 Apr. 2001); ‘Strachan Anger at Aussie Farce’, Coventry Evening Telegraph (10 Apr. 2001).
Quoted in Lynch, ‘Socceroos Hit 31 without Loss’.
Quoted in Frank Praverman and Eamonn Duff, ‘And We Thought Sven Had It Tough’, The Sun (12 Apr. 2001).
Ally Guthrie, ‘Minnows Have SFA to Contribute’, Daily Star of Scotland (16 Apr. 2001).
Ken Bates, ‘Sepp’s a Sandwich Short of a Picnic!’, The People (29 Apr. 2001).
‘Glorious Defeat’, The Times (12 Apr. 2001).
Des Kelly, ‘If You Think 31-0 is Bad…’, Daily Mirror (13 Apr. 2001).
‘Things You Should Knoa about American Samoa’, Daily Mirror (12 Apr. 2001).