Zoue wrote:
mikeyg123 wrote:
Fiki wrote:
ALESI wrote:
Fiki wrote:
Whether the referendum was legal or not, is ultimately irrelevant. We don't know which course the Catalan politicians will choose for future action. And I believe the FIA have already considered this issue; I doubt Spain would do what Switzerland once did and organise their national GP in France, or Luxembourg theirs on the Nürburgring. While it is possible to have your national Grand Prix abroad, I doubt Spain would be happy to have theirs in Catalonia, and I also doubt the FIA are anxious to grant Catalonia the right to hold a Grand Prix, before an international settlement of the independence issue has been reached.
It is very easy to point out, as the Spanish prime minister did, that the referendum was/is illegal, but I would be very surprised if their constitution tells secessionists how to procede.
Since Barcelona
remains part of Spain I don't see a problem. If Silverstone was in Scotland we wouldn't be worrying about that would we?
I gather we might be nearer an answer to the question by the end of this week, concerning Barcelona remaining part of Spain.
I suppose that if Silverstone were in Scotland, and Scotland were independent, we wouldn't be going to the British Grand Prix there, would we?
Picture my surprise when I found out that there is no Great Britain, nor even a United Kingdom in that peculiar sport called football. I understand next to nothing about that sport, and even less about the lack of a national team for international games.
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are all separate nations that form the United Kingdom. So it makes sense that they all field separate national teams.
Yeah, that logic stutters a bit when you consider that Great Britain fields a single, united team at the Olympics. Also the Davis Cup in Tennis. Although it has to be said that they are the exception to the rule
Is the UK unique in having four "home teams" to root for, I wonder?
It comes down to how the international bodies of those sports are organised and how came about. Sports whose international bodies stem from UK-centric organisations included the separate UK nations from their inception (not just football, but also rugby for example).
But the UK is not the only sovereign state to have multiple teams in FIFA. Puerto Rico is under USA sovereignty, but they have a separate team in FIFA. Faroe Islands have their own team and they are an autonomous country of the Kingdom of Denmark.
Non-sovereign states that are members of FIFA;
American Samoa
Anguilla
Aruba
Cayman Islands
Cook Island
Curaçao
Bermuda
British Virgin Islands
Faroe Islands
Gibraltar
Guam
Hong Kong
Macau
Montserrat
New Caledonia
Palestine
Puerto Rico
Suriname
Tahiti
Turks and Caicos Islands
US Virgin Islands
In recent times most major international sporting bodies will only want to include sovereign states.
UEFA/FIFA nowadays will no longer allow federations belonging to non-sovereign nations to join. As far as I know the last dependent territory to make it into UEFA/FIFA was Gibraltar, and that was because Gibraltar successfully argued that its application to join pre-dated the rule that closed the door to non-sovereign nations.