2. Literature review
2.1 Recognition in international law
International law has spent a century debating what makes a territory a state. The canonical reference is the Montevideo Convention (1933): Article 1 lists four criteria (a permanent population, a defined territory, government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states) and Article 3 nails down the so-called declaratory position, under which “the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states”. The rival, constitutive position holds the opposite: it is recognition by others that constitutes the state as a member of international society. In contemporary practice the two coexist poorly: Kosovo satisfies the Montevideo criteria and still has no seat at the UN, because recognition is also politics, and the path to the Security Council runs into a veto.
2.2 Nationalism and sports diplomacy
The review’s second leg comes from the literature on nationalism and sport. Benedict Anderson (1983) defined the nation as an imagined community: too large for its members to know one another, it needs artefacts that make it visible to itself, and few artefacts do that as effectively as a national team (eleven bodies with the same crest, an anthem, a crowd that recognises itself). Max Weber (1919) characterised the state by the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a territory; the national team offers the symbolic, inexpensive version of that monopoly, the monopoly of representation on a pitch. The sports-diplomacy literature (Murray, 2018) describes the deliberate use of sport by state and non-state actors to advance recognition, image and ties; and Menary’s (2007) survey of “the lands that FIFA forgot” documented the limbo of those left outside the system.
2.3 FIFA’s political economy
A third line of literature, less cited in this specific debate, treats FIFA not as a neutral referee but as an actor with its own interest. Jennings (2006) and Sugden and Tomlinson (1998) documented how, in the Havelange-Blatter era, the expansion of the number of affiliated associations served a concrete internal-governance purpose: more small members mean more votes at Congress, and FIFA’s development scheme (the Goal Programme) distributed resources to those associations in a way later investigations (Pieth, 2014, in the independent governance committee’s report) linked to voting loyalty. Under this reading, FIFA has an institutional incentive to maximise its own membership base, independent of outside entities’ demand for recognition. What this piece adds to the three lines is testing them explicitly against one another, rather than treating “FIFA recognises whoever wants recognition” as the only available explanation.