Domestic football in Ariddia

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Football in Ariddia may well be a national craze, but foreigners are often surprised to find it doesn’t work at all in the same way as in the rest of the world. This is due to Ariddia being a society in which money has no place. Consequently there are no incentives to tempt foreign players into Ariddian clubs, and little to motivate Ariddian players into joining a club outside their home city, town or village. Ariddians seem to like it that way, one common point made being that “at least a town’s club in Ariddia represents the people of that town”.

City clubs routinely play against clubs from the armed forces – the army, navy and air force each have one or more football clubs -, the police, various universities, and other groups which have started their own club. There is even a “Limean Island FC”, founded by West Ariddians who have moved to the PDSRA, and whose club is a quiet protest against the separatist government in West Ariddia. Nobody in Ariddia plays football for the money, since there’s no money to be gained by it. “Professional” football players sometimes alternate their playing with another job.

To enable Ariddians to play in foreign clubs, the Ariddian Football Association, run by the government in Rêvane, established recruitment guidelines. The rules stipulate that the buying club must pay its Ariddian players a sufficient salary to guarantee them decent living conditions in the nation in question, and must also pay a supplement directly to the Ariddian national treasury. The overall sum is sufficiently low to make Ariddian players extremely cheap on the international market.

Most members of the national Rouge-et-Noirs team play (or played) abroad:

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Ul U (right), playing for Kelsey, dodges an acrobatic opponent
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Football in the Ariddian Arctic Islands

This semi-autonomous Ariddian dependency has a moneyless society for the most part, due to Indigenous Arctic Islanders' traditions of communal work and sharing. Thus domestic football in the AAIs functions in a similar fashion to domestic football in the PDSRA.

There are five clubs, which compete regularly in summer (i.e., when the northern islands are not trapped in ice and inaccessible): Etenvua Atoll FC, Teayojo & Iwao FC, Roae & Fetuo FC, Jojelkiwa Icemen FC, and, from Rijo Atoll, Southern Arctic FC.

So far, there has never been a match between a PDSRA club and an Ariddian Artic Islander club, even though the latter are theoretically run by the Ariddian Football Association.

University Cup

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“Heat raisers” accompany the Cité-Belle T.W.O.U. team
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The University Cup is a competition between the thirteen universities of the PDSRA (that is, excluding universities in Limea). It is played once a year, usually in March. The teams (one per university) are randomly drawn in two groups of four and one of five. The winner of each group advances to the semi-finals, along with the overall “best loser”.

The event attracts nation-wide attention, and recruiters for clubs and even the national team are often in attendance to spot budding talent. In this way, players Xavier Xu and Cassie Lee were both invited to join the Ariddian national team after playing for the University of Haven and the Southern University respectively.

The team of the Cité-Belle Third World Open University, which usually contains many foreign students, is the only one which, by tradition, is accompanied by “heat raisers” (i.e., cheerleaders) wearing the colours of Ariddia. Conversely, the teams from the University of Rêvane, the University of Rêvane-Ouest, New Hope General Universiy, Cité-Belle Centre University and the Southern University all perform the ulek (or a variant thereof) at the start of every match.


See also

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