6. Testing the three hypotheses against the evidence
H1 (low-cost recognition) finds real, but partial, support. Kosovo and Palestine, the two cases of most contested national identity in the table, are exactly the ones that most publicly celebrate sporting membership as a marker of political existence — the 141-23 vote that admitted Kosovo in 2016 was treated by the press and Kosovar authorities as a moment of international recognition equal, in symbolic weight, to a diplomatic seat. The problem for H1 alone is that it does not explain the cases where demand clearly is not the engine: Monaco has full sovereignty and never sought FIFA; Kiribati and Tuvalu are full UN members and never entered the global football system. If demand for symbolic recognition were universal among those who could pursue it, these two reverse patterns should not exist.
H2 (institutional inertia) finds the strongest support in the table. The large majority of divergence cases predate the 2004 statutory change: Faroe Islands (1988), Hong Kong (1954), the four British nations (since FIFA’s own founding and IFAB’s current voting structure in 1958). The two most-cited post-2004 exceptions, Kosovo and Gibraltar, only occurred because external legal pressure (CAS, in Gibraltar’s case) or a politically charged Congress vote (in Kosovo’s case) forced the exception to the rule FIFA itself wrote to close the door. This is direct evidence for H2: left to its own institutional logic, the system tends to converge with the UN’s map, not diverge from it, and when it diverges today it is because something from outside forced it to.
H3 (institutional self-interest) finds direct support in the Zanzibar-Western Sahara pair. Neither of the previous two hypotheses explains why CAF admits Zanzibar in March 2017 and expels it in July of the same year, or why it rejects Western Sahara in 2023 despite the African Union’s own recognition since 1984. The pattern here is neither symbolic demand being met (H1) nor inertia being maintained by omission (H2): it is active control, in both directions, applied selectively. CAF decided, decided again in the opposite direction four months later, and decided once more in 2023 using a criterion (UN recognition) it wrote into its own statutes in 2021. Who ultimately controls the map is not the entity knocking on the door, it is the organisation that decides, whenever it wants, to reopen or reclose that door.
The most defensible reading, putting the three tests together: H2 explains most of the stock of cases (why the divergence exists today, at its historical origin), H1 explains why certain rare, new entries (Kosovo) carry disproportionate political weight when they occur, and H3 explains why the system is not a neutral conveyor belt receiving whoever shows up, but an active decision-making apparatus that admits, expels and rejects according to its own criteria. The three hypotheses, tested together, explain more than any one alone.