Franconia have created a team and have already scheduled their first friendly match.
Franconia is a region in the heart of Germany and belongs officially to the federal state of Bavaria. It counts for about four million inhabitants of which around 500,000 live in its biggest city Nuremberg. Their football club FC Nuremberg is currently in 14th position of the Bundesliga table.
Most people in the region support this team or their archrival Greuther Fürth, who are currently on the second in the second tier of German football with a great chance to play in the Bundesliga next year.
The past was even more glorious, as these both teams won seven of nine German Championships in the 1920s and in a friendly match between Germany and the Netherlands in 1924 all eleven players came only from the teams of Nuremberg and Fuerth.
There is one guy who didn’t forget about the past and now wants to reanimate these times. Helmuth Weisensel, 51 years old, doesn’t feel represented in his Franconian identity by either one of the two professional clubs in that region, which is why he has been working on forming a Franconian national team for almost a year now.
Together with the separatist Franconian Union, he founded the Franconian Football Association and then asked the Bavarian Football Association if they could help him to organize a friendly match. Surprisingly they agreed to this idea but only under the condition that they would organize it themselves because they didn’ want to acknowledge his FFA.
The veto of the Bavarian Football Association slowed down Weisensel’s ambitions but it didn’t stop him. Even though he couldn’t recruite any active football players for his team as they are all members of the Bavarian Football Association, he started to ask former professional players from that region.
So far eight ex-players promised him to join the Franconian national team, from which Martin Schneider, who had played 379 times in the Bundesliga, is probably the most famous one.
Despite his age of 45 years he was immediately interested in this project, whereas another potential player had to withdraw his plans to participate as he is a current coach of a fourth division team and the Bavarian Football Association reminded him that he could lose his coaching licence.
All these obstacles just seemed to motivate the initiator even more as he has already organized their first friendly match on May 29th in Schweinfurt. Their first opponent then is going to be Tamil Eelam, a region on the island of Sri Lanka and the home of the Tamils.
Now they only have to find the rest of the players to complete their squad.