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International Football Maybe pigs can fly? Maybe it’s fine for cyclists to ride through red traffic lights? Maybe Liz Truss did know what she was doing? And maybe, just maybe, San Marino have won a football match. Players dropped to their knees at full time as substitutes and staff piled onto the pitch in celebration. Fans whipped their tops off and flung them around their heads. Freed from Desire by Gala was played loudly (of course it was). Advertisement It had finished San Marino 1-0 Liechtenstein, a result that on the face of it shouldn’t mean a great deal; two of European and world football’s weakest teams played out a dog of a match with precious little quality on show. It was decided by a winning goal fit to grace any Sunday league encounter. But none of that mattered. This was a genuinely historic and joyous occasion. At the 177th time of asking, San Marino had won a competitive match of football. ? ? SAN MARINO WIN A GAME FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 20+ YEARS & A COMPETITIVE MATCH FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER! !! History is made as the worst team in the FIFA rankings (210th) finally end the longest winless run in international football history (140 games dating back to April 2004)! !! pic. twitter. com/xb B3M2WQUE — The Sweeper (@Sweeper Pod) September 5, 2024 For any uninitiated U. S. readers, let’s eradicate any confusion immediately; no that’s not an autocorrected typo and, no, this article isn’t meant to be about Dan Marino. This is about the world’s worst international football nation, San Marino, a tiny landlocked republic in north-central Italy. It has a population of 33, 000, roughly the same size as Middletown in Orange County, New York. In the UK, we’re talking Brierley Hill near Dudley, Letchworth Garden City, Morecambe, Pontefract or Witney. Since its first official football matches in 1990, San Marino have won precisely one football match — in a friendly against, yes, Liechtenstein at home in 2004. They have managed nine draws, including against the likes of St Lucia and Gibraltar. And they have lost 196 times. Some of those have been utter hidings. Unyielding shellackings. Relentless drubbings. We’re talking 9-0 to Spain, 11-0 to Netherlands and the nadir of a 13-0 home defeat against Germany in 2006. It isn’t just European football superpowers who dish the thrashings out: Poland beat them 10-0, Ukraine smashed them 8-0, as did Norway in 2017. Teams mostly see San Marino as cannon fodder. It is not a case of whether they will beat them, but how many they’ll win by. In some cases, anything less than 5-0 becomes humiliation for the winning team. Advertisement San Marino’s players are mostly amateurs who have other jobs away from football as a main source of income, such as dentists, accountants, painters and decorators. Some are even students. Their record in competitive matches has been the worst in European football for some time. In World Cup and European Championship qualifiers and Nations League matches, they had lost 171 of the previous 176 games, scoring only 23 goals along the way. To some, it would be a thankless football existence, completely bereft of the kind of success or ambition with which most teams would associate. But it’s all relative. When you’re amateurs playing for the love of the sport, representing your nation with pride and you’ve not won a match of any kind for 20 years, any goal feels as sweet as scoring in a cup final. A 0-0 draw feels like a trophy win. “People in other countries don’t understand what it is like, ” the former manager Pierangelo Manzaroli told The Athletic of the 0-0 draw he oversaw against Estonia in 2012. “It was an incredible moment… the same feeling as when my daughter was born. ” And here, in September 2024, was their World Cup final: a home game against Liechtenstein, the last (and only) team San Marino beat, back in 2004. That was in a friendly, but this was an official Nations League match against potentially beatable opponents (Liechtenstein are on a four-year winless streak of their own) with three points to play for… three points to win for the first time in the country’s history. Liechtenstein were 199th in the FIFA world rankings, only 11 above San Marino, the team ranked 210th and last. Remember the name, Nicko Sensoli. The 19-year-old’s first international goal gave San Marino their first win in two decades and their first competitive victory. There were only a few hundred in attendance but, given the wooden spoon stakes, the tension was palpable from the off and the game suffered. In a first half so boring it would make the spectator sport of fishing blush, neither team managed a shot on target. There were a couple of moments of interest, both rendered meaningless by an offside flag. San Marino hit the post through Nicola Nanni, currently without a club having recently featured in the Italian lower leagues, while Fabio Luque Notaro found the net for Liechtenstein but VAR called it back for offside in the build-up. Yes, VAR is so entrenched in the sport it has now reached the 5, 000-capacity Stadio Olimpico di Serravalle. Advertisement Then, in the 52nd minute, came the goal the game deserved — and one that Sammarinese people will remember forever. Here it is in all its fuzzy, screenshotted glory. The ball was chucked towards the box… A Liechtenstein defender inadvertently headed it backwards into his own penalty area… Goalkeeper Benjamin Buchel (clearly a man not getting any younger) came to claim, but defender Niklas Beck hesitated. There was confusion, panic and dithering aplenty… Enter Sensoli, with an opportunistic, sensoliational prod, if you will, looping it into the empty net… And he wheeled away in celebration. A San Marino goal, a rare thing of beauty (or the beast). All the subs joined in the celebrations and the PA announcer got everyone to shout “SENSOLI! ” multiple times. And then the next 30-odd minutes were all about, well, hanging on for dear life for the country’s first win in 20 years. With 13 minutes to go, San Marino were conceding completely unnecessary corners and going down with cramp. Whenever they managed to cajole the ball over the halfway line, they repeatedly failed to head towards the corner to eat up time. You could tell it had been a while since they’d done this. By the 92nd minute, they were celebrating winning any free kick, or goal kick. Just any kick, really. And then, after seven minutes of nerve-shredding stoppage time in which towering defender Dante Rossi repelled everything Liechtenstein threw at him, the referee finally blew his whistle. Ecstasy, relief and pure unconfirmed joy. The much-vaunted San Marino fan account on X, which has far more followers (170, 000) than there are people in San Marino, celebrated accordingly. SENSOLI SCORED A GOAL SENSOLI SCORED A FREAKING GOAL SENSOLI YOU ABSOLUTE LEGEND — San Marino fan account (@San Marino_FA) September 5, 2024 IT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING. IT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING FOLKS. — San Marino fan account (@San Marino_FA) September 5, 2024 It’s fair to say that Martino Bastianelli, a Dutchman who set up the account in 2016, had been waiting for this day for some time… SAN MARINO WON. — San Marino fan account (@San Marino_FA) September 5, 2024 THEY DID IT. THE FIRST EVER COMPETITIVE WIN, NO ONE CAN TAKE THAT AWAY FOR SAN MARINO. TODAY SAN MARINO WROTE FOOTBALL HISTORY. THANK YOU SENSOLI, THANK YOU SAN MARINO. FORZA TITANI. — San Marino fan account (@San Marino_FA) September 5, 2024 The result had been coming. Since November 2021, when San Marino were annihilated 10-0 by England, they had only conceded more than four goals to an opposition team on one occasion in 24 matches (a 6-0 defeat to Poland in 2023). The introduction of the Nations League, where countries play against similarly-ranked sides, has benefited San Marino, who in their current group play Liechtenstein and Gibraltar (ranking, 198) twice. In the biennial trench of World Cup/Euros qualifiers, they would be automatically lumped in with considerably better opponents, separated by their fellow worst teams by the seeding system. Notable results in the past couple of years have included narrow defeats by one goal to Iceland, Lithuania and, in probably the ‘best’ defeat in the nation’s history, if that is such a thing, a marginal 2-1 loss at home to Euro 2020 semi-finalists Denmark last year. Rasmus Hojlund had given Denmark the lead before San Marino actually equalised and held them level for nine minutes, only for Yussuf Poulsen to win the game 20 minutes from time. Advertisement They followed that up by scoring in a 3-1 defeat to Kazakhstan, and netted again in a 2-1 loss against Finland, meaning San Marino had scored in three consecutive games for the first time. And now, a first competitive victory. Their winless streak of 140 matches and 20 years? Over. No wins for 7, 436 days? Over. Cristiano Ronaldo had scored 131 goals for Portugal in that time, while San Marino had scored 22. But now? One Nations League group game played, one win. Top of the league, having a laugh. Until last night, San Marino’s most famous goal had been scored by Davide Gualtieri after just seven seconds of a World Cup qualifier against England way back in 1993 — so long ago it was the same year Jurassic Park was released. Gualtieri is still interviewed about that goal now, not least by The Athletic last year. Sensoli will now spend the rest of his life talking about his goal; the one that ended 20 years of hurt. What a moment, what a night. Life finds a way. GO DEEPER A week with San Marino - the worst international football team in the world (Top photo: Giuseppe Maffia/De Fodi Images via Getty Images) Get all-access to exclusive stories. Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us. Tim Spiers is a football journalist for The Athletic, based in London. He joined in 2019 having previously worked at the Express & Star in Wolverhampton. Follow Tim on Twitter @Tim Spiers