Match of the Dales
The Yorkshire football team taking devolution into their own hands — and feet
With a Halifax warehouse manager as chairman and a joiner from the ninth tier of English competition as its first-ever goal-scorer, a new team representing Yorkshire is proving that to compete in international football you don’t need Premier League superstars — or even a country. Is this the story of a pub side getting ideas above its station, or the first step towards independence from the UK for God’s Own County?
at the start of this year, on a cold, grey Sunday afternoon, Jordan Coduri carried out a deliberate political act. He scored a goal. A lean, rangy midfielder, he raced onto a perfectly weighted forward pass, timing his run to break the opposition’s offside trap before bringing the ball down with his right foot. With three defenders racing to catch up, Coduri let the ball bounce twice before twisting his body and unleashing a low left-foot finish that beat the keeper’s lunge by no more than half an inch. “Then all I heard was a massive roar,” he remembers. “I was mobbed immediately.”
One fan found his way behind goal, fists pumping wildly. Pyrotechnic flare smoke began to drift across the pitch. Coduri acknowledged his achievement with a single raised arm. It was a moment he had never imagined possible. He had just scored his first international goal; more than that, just scored Yorkshire’s first international goal. “Nobody can take that away from me,” says the 25-yearold, who is, in fact, a joiner from Halifax. “It’s written down in history.” As he jogged back to his half, a chant rose up in low, slow unison: “Yoooork-shire. Yoooork-shire. Yoooork-shire.”
This, obviously, doesn’t make any sense. Yorkshire cannot have an international football team for the simple reason that Yorkshire is not a country. But to Coduri, his teammates and the 627 people who’d made their way to the compact ground of Hemsworth Miners Welfare FC in Pontefract, this was only a detail. Paperwork. Nothing that couldn't be sorted out. Before kick-off, an honour guard of young mascots took to the pitch waving large white rose banners. For the national anthem, the crowd and players sang “On Ilkla Moor Baht’ at”. At least, that had been the plan: the PA system packed up so they had to skip it.
The opposition was Ellan Vannin (“Isle of Man” in Manx). The Isle of Man is not a country either, but again, this didn’t seem to make it any less of an international fixture. They had a smart red and gold kit, were cheered on by a handful of fans with Manx flags and even boasted a proper mascot, Magnus, a large, tailless cat in red dungarees. The game ended in a 1–1 draw, Coduri’s goal levelling things in the second-half. “It was a good result,” says Coduri, who plays club football for Penistone Church FC, a semi-professional Barnsley side recently promoted to the ninth tier of English football. “We all knew what we were representing.”
But what were they representing? What, in fact, were they playing at? Because at any other point in British history, a bunch of unpaid footballers and pyro-waving fans attempting to pass this spectacle off as an “international” fixture might be seen as a form of bizarre parochialism; perhaps even slightly tragic. But then, this is Britain in 2018. Ordinary people are increasingly used to the idea that their political destinies are in their own hands. In the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, just under 45 per cent of the country expressed its wish to leave the United Kingdom and go it alone. Two years later came the UK Brexit referendum, powered, in part, by the mantra of “taking back control”. Now there is increasing pressure on Westminster to allow other British regions to do just that. Last year, for the first time, the Manchester region was granted a so-called metro mayor, with genuine powers over local issues: Andy Burnham MP was elected.
“And as a result, he’s probably a more important person in national politics now than when he was on Labour’s front bench,” says Jonn Elledge, who covers local governance for the New Statesman. Set against this backdrop of populism and localism, all bets are off.
This time last year, there was no Yorkshire team, but 45-year-old Halifax warehouse manager Phil Hegarty got to thinking, what if there was? “I’m the sort of person who, if I think of something, I do it,” he says, with a cheerful, unfussy air. That said, he hadn’t any experience in birthing new footballing nations. “I’ve been a teacher abroad, I’ve worked in welfare, I’ve done all sorts. For the past two years, I’ve been in a warehouse driving a forklift truck,” he says, grinning. “But I've done nothing to prepare me for this.”
It wasn’t the first time Hegarty had toyed with the idea, often having pub chats where he and his mates picked a hypothetical Yorkshire XI — your Fabian Delphs, your Kyle Walkers, your James Milners, your John Stoneses — only this time something was different. There was
a political backdrop. Last year, Yorkshire was locked in a tussle with Westminster over devolution. It still is. The government, understanding there were practical as well as political advantages in devolving small amounts of power to parts of the UK, proposed a series of region deals, which would see cities like Leeds and Sheffield granted metro-mayors operating in a similar way to Burnham’s Manchester. The deal for Sheffield City Region had been done, but most local councils across Yorkshire would rather see the old ceremonial county exist as a big, meaty, single devolved bloc: a large chunk of the country containing over 5.3m people, operating as a political whole. This so-called “One Yorkshire” deal is not what Westminster offered and not what Westminster wants. But it is very, very much what most of Yorkshire wants. In December, a referendum in Doncaster and Barnsley asked people if they wanted to join the Sheffield City Region, or push for a Yorkshire-wide deal. In both towns, over 80 per cent of voters wanted to be part of a devolved Yorkshire.
In March, 18 of Yorkshire’s 20 council leaders signed a letter to Local Government Secretary Sajid Javid telling him, effectively, to get a move on. There was something slightly medieval about it, a whiff of northern barons limbering up for a fight. Under these circumstances, the emergence of a national Yorkshire football team is more political weathervane than it is novelty. hegarty, and this is important, is not a crank, not one of those secession-obsessed flat-cap crazies occasionally encountered in Yorkshire. By all appearances, he is a fairly normal bloke who likes football and feels the same as lots of people living in Yorkshire.
“It’s the condescending nature of British politics towards the regions, this feeling that people, especially working class people, can’t be trusted to make their own decisions,” he says. “There is a real feeling of being fed up with that. People want to start making decisions about what happens where they live, and not have some remote Sir Humphrey Appleby type making decisions for them.”
Time and again, he says, the powers that be have done their best to slice and dice Yorkshire into smaller, weaker parcels. Even the government’s City Regions proposal felt to many like a policy of divide and conquer. “If you keep breaking these cultural and historical units down again and again, people forget who they are.” A football team, Hegarty reasoned, might help remind them. After a standing army, nothing demonstrates political legitimacy like an international football team. “With all the devolution stuff, it seemed like a natural step.”
He created a Twitter account for his Yorkshire International Football Association (Yifa). He read about an organisation called Conifa (Confederation of Independent Football Associations), a governing body, founded in 2013 and based in Luleå, Sweden, for international sides that do not have Fifa membership. Most of Conifa’s international sides do not have Fifa membership because, technically, they are not countries. Instead, they are teams representing repressed minorities, de facto nations and stateless peoples. Tibet has a team that plays in Conifa competitions. So do the Rohingya people of Myanmar, and Greenland, Western Armenia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Darfur plus a host of exotically named places — Cascadia, Occitania, Székely Land, Raetia — because they don’t officially exist outside the hearts and minds of their players and fans. Currently top-ranked by Conifa is Panjab, a UK-based team representing the Punjabi diaspora. Number two is Padania, a region of Italy that Mario Balotelli’s brother plays for. Third is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The Isle of Man, clearly a tidy team, sits at number four.
Hegarty accepts that grumbling about the problems facing Yorkshire people — the low rate of per-capita public transport spending in Yorkshire relative to London, for example — suddenly seems a little petty when you consider the plights of some Conifa members.
“You look at the Rohingya people, and they face oppression and death on a daily basis. So yes, we can’t put our claim to be a minority region in the same pile as that,” he says. In terms of being accepted for Conifa membership, two things that pretty much guarantee membership are already being a de facto nation (like Tibet), or having a unique language, (the Isle of Man). Yorkshire ticks neither box. “We were in a weak position from the beginning.”
Hegarty and the Yifa were undaunted and put together an application which, among other things, pointed out that while Yorkshire doesn’t technically have its own language, it does have a dialect. “A very old and distinguished dialect,” says Hegarty who, for the first time, sounds a bit like he’s having to spin things out. “Not a form of English, particularly.” They cited Yorkshire’s Nordic heritage (the team’s nickname is “The Vikings”), but more than anything they emphasised the simple fact that people from Yorkshire identify intensely with being from Yorkshire.
In 2014, a survey about identity by Dr Pete Woodcock, a politics lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, found that while around 15 per cent of people identified as being solely Yorkshire, another 40 per cent said they felt more Yorkshire than English. To literally everyone in the UK, this is not news. We all know Yorkshiremen love talking about being from Yorkshire more than anything else. But to Conifa? This was brand new information. Absolute gold, and they lapped it up.
“When we received the application, we were a bit surprised,” says Sascha Düerkop, the general secretary of Conifa who talks with a technocratic matter-of-factness. “Because we had never heard of Yorkshire. I asked them to
justify a bit more what was so special about Yorkshire. And the most surprising and convincing fact was that it is a region with a simple majority of people who identify with Yorkshire more than the UK. This was very surprising to us, but also a strong argument for them being included.
“If we have a political agenda — which we don’t — but if we have any, it’s that we are basically asking people, ‘What do you identify with?’ And if there’s a significant amount of people who identify with an entity then, no matter what political status it has, we give them the platform to represent that entity through international football.”
In January this year, less than six months after the idea occurred to him, Hegarty was chairman of a Conifa-affiliated international football team. a team, of course, needs players. And a manager. And fans. At the end of 2017, Yorkshire appointed Ryan Farrell as head coach. A former semi-pro player, primary school teacher and now academy coach at Bradford City, he was, like many people, initially sceptical about the project. But a friend suggested he apply for the job, so he chanced his arm. “There was no real interview process,” he says. “It was just a case of having a sit-down chat with Phil. We got on really well and we went from there.”
Farrell selected a squad of players from local lower-league teams: Ossett Albion, Athersley Recreation, Frickley Athletic. Jamie Vardy, Danny Rose and Aaron Lennon did not register an interest in turning out for their county, but the door is always open. “If they wanted to get on board and it was something they believed in and were passionate about, that’d be great,” says Hegarty, brightly. “They would be really welcome in the team.”
For now, the most experienced player in the team is the captain, Patrick McGuire, who began his career at Bradford City before a string of local non-league sides. Primary school teacher McGuire is 30, barrel-chested, with heavy stubble and a sleeve tattoo. He’s found learning about Yorkshire’s Conifa opponents illuminating. “I’m the school’s geography coordinator, so I’ve got to be clued-up on certain things,” he says. “It’s surprising how many non-league footballers are teachers.”
The fixture against the Isle of Man was the first time he’d felt nervous about a football match in a very long time, he says. “It was like being at a proper football game again. Big build-up, proper atmosphere, you could see the buzz around the ground.”
Owing to bad weather, McGuire estimates the Yorkshire side had “about 15 minutes” of training together before the match, and because it took place on a Sunday, quite a few of the team had played for their clubs the day before. “I thought, I’ll have a go and if my legs say no then they say no. Luckily, I got through it fine.”
In fact, McGuire provided the assist for Coduri’s goal. He says he’s particularly proud to captain Yorkshire given that, while he was born in Bradford, everyone else in his family comes from Lancashire. “I’m a massive black sheep,” he says. “I’ve always copped a lot of stick at family dos and stuff. But I’m a mouthy lad. I can give it back.”
It’s not all banter, though. Being a Yorkshire international genuinely means something to those who are. “It’s a good way of putting Yorkshire on the map, plus as players it’s a platform for us, especially the younger lads,” McGuire says. “There were quite a few scouts at the game against Ellan Vannin and it’s great for them if they’re looking to rise up the football pyramid. I said to the lads that because of all the media attention this is getting, there are going to be more and more players who are going to want to get into this. I’ve had loads of messages from guys asking me to throw their names into the ring. I’ve told them that the shirts are ours to lose now. We’ll have to fight to keep them.” the prospect of watching tattooed primary school teachers and lanky young joiners fight for Yorkshire is, undoubtedly, part of the appeal. The Yorkshire football fans who feel disenfranchised by and alienated from Westminster politics are just as likely to feel disenfranchised by and alienated from top level football.
Ian Smith, 33, runs Yifa’s East Yorkshire supporters’ club. At weekends, he sells matchday programmes at Hull City. But he’s exasperated with his Championship club. “At Hull, we’ve got players on stupid wages, and you’re sat there thinking, how can you justify that? And then you see the Yorkshire lads just proper grafting and actually playing for pride as much as anything.”
This pride also serves as bonding agent. Back in 2015, before making a speech in Yorkshire, a hot mic caught David Cameron joking about his hosts: “We thought people in Yorkshire hated everyone else,” he said. “We didn’t realise they hated each other so much.” And it’s sort of true.
“There’s very little common ground when it comes to football in Yorkshire, with the exception that most of us hate Leeds,” Smith says. Now, suddenly, there’s a team everyone can get behind. “I’ve got lads who go to Hull messaging me asking when the next Yorkshire game is. It was surreal at the Isle of Man game, because you could see everybody coming together. There were Leeds flags, Barnsley flags, people in different club colours. Everybody was united. It was a brilliant atmosphere.”
Harry Baker is 18, and runs the Yifa supporters’ branch in Cleckheaton, just south of Bradford. “It’s a kind of standard local
Yorkshire town,” he says. “It’s not a place you would go on holiday, if you know what I mean?’ He pauses, perhaps to think of something more positive to say. “We’ve got the world’s biggest Indian restaurant. It’s absolutely massive.”
Baker rounded up 10 of his mates to come to the Isle of Man game, which meant he ended up running the supporters’ club by default. The youngest member is 13, the oldest in his forties, “but most of the membership is around 17 to 19,” he says. “What I’ve heard from a lot of people is that there is a growing disillusionment with the FA and with modern football. Ticket prices are becoming unaffordable for working class people and you can’t sit where you want and you can’t stand.”
Without making assumptions for Baker’s cohorts, he, at least, has been thinking about the wider politics underpinning all this. “I’ve heard a lot of people saying this shows the UK is becoming more insular, and that Yorkshire will want to become independent soon. I don’t think that’s the case at all.” Rather, he thinks people want a bit more autonomy, “a regional parliament. Because when you look at the differences in spending, we do feel a bit like we are being left behind.”
Hegarty says he spent the day of Yorkshire’s first game in a state of constant motion, doing interviews, making sandwiches and Cup-aSoups for the players. The important thing, however, was that it actually happened.
“I think that until the first game was played, there were a lot of wry smiles and a few winks behind my back,” he says. “I’m still coming across people I told about the concept four months ago, and they’re asking ‘whatever happened to that idea?’ And when I tell them that we’re established and that we’ve played our first game, they are quite taken aback.”
Yorkshire’s second game took place at the end of March, against the Chagos Islands, officially part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. The Chagossians were evicted from their string of tropical atolls between 1967 and 1973 by the British — to allow the United States to construct a military base — so they are a diaspora team. Before the fixture, which Yorkshire won 6-0, the Chagos Islands had played 10 matches, three of which were friendlies against the Principality of Sealand.
If you don’t know, Sealand is a naval abandoned fort, a 5,920sq ft offshore platform seven and a half miles off the Suffolk coast. It is not a Conifa member, and its applications have always been rejected, not least on the grounds that nobody actually lives there. “You can just buy a ‘passport’ online,” says Düerkop, mildly exasperated. “Obviously, we don’t accept such joke teams.”
Having an international football team does not automatically mean that the world will take you more seriously. And however enthusiastic Yorkshire’s fans are right now, it might only take one unlucky hiding at the hands of Greenland for the novelty to wear off. But that hasn’t happened yet. The plan for now is to play more games, rise up the Conifa rankings, compete in Conifa world cups and European championships and maybe even host one. There is also the stated ambition of a showcase fixture against Catalonia.
“I believe they’re very selective about who they play against, but you never know — watch this space,” Hegarty says. Given the fact that, last October, the Parliament of Catalonia attempted to unilaterally declare independence from Spain, the prospect of the two football teams meeting as equals would be provocative to say the least. It’s a tantalising prospect not just for the knowledge that a forklift truck driver from Halifax has, because of a little gumption and stubbornness, found himself at least tangentially involved in high international affairs.
Hegarty, for the time being, is simply happy that his team exists. “All the political and sporting stuff aside, I did spend a lot of time asking myself, why am I doing this? But after the first game, I got my answer,” he says.
“It was seeing everyone’s reaction. It might have been only 627 people but they were all behind the team. We had kids out there, mascots flying flags, and it just meant something really special to them. It made their eyes light up. It made their souls come alive. And for me, that’s a massive reward. If I can bring a little bit more of that to Yorkshire, I’ll be very happy.”