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Matchworn by Gilli Rólantsson 09.10.2021 FRO 🇫🇴 : AUT 🇦🇹 0-2
Manufacturer: Macron
Source: ÖFB staff
THE COUNTRY
The Faroe Islands – not to be confused with the “Pharao Islands”, which sound like an Egypt-themed water park – are basically a Lord of the Rings film set, slapped somewhere in the North Atlantic. Besides looking gorgeous, the Faroe Islands are mostly known for their grass-covered roofs, their unpredictable weather, slaughtering wales and the fact that their sheep and puffins outnumber their 52,000 inhabitants.
The Faroese national team, in turn, is notorious for being a stumbling block for much bigger nations. Despite their small population, the team rarely suffers high defeats and managed to climb to an astonishing 74th place in the 2015 FIFA ranking, after demolishing Greece three times in a row. Alongside the Greek, the Austrians are also still recovering from their famous 1-0 loss against the Faroe Islands in 1990, where Faroese coach Guðlaugsson motivated his team to “throw yourself into the tackles against those arrogant Austrians […]”, which they apparently did and thus forced Austria’s coach Josef Hickersberger to resign and further caused a major shitstorm in Austria. To this day, a rerun of the game is shown annually on Faroese TV.
THE SHIRT
After an extremely successful 2018 World Cup qualification campaign, where the Faroe Islands finished fourth, outperforming Latvia and Andorra, the “Landsliðið”set off to play an even more successful Nation’s League season, in which the team dominated their League D group and consequently got promoted to group C, showing the world that they are truly a step above Europe’s other smaller football nations like Latvia, Malta, Luxembourg or Andorra.
The shirt marks the last model produced by Macron as part of UEFA’s “Kit Assistance Scheme”, where small European nations are supplied with bespoke football kits.
Similar to its predecessor and to other Macron shirts, it is loaded with little details that show just how much Macron cares about the smaller teams: a tiny flag on the neck, two small blue and red seams on the collar and an almost invisible embossed outline of the Faroe Island’s map on the lower back as well as shiny pinstripes all over the shirt make this a classy piece of fabric.
It was worn by striker Gilli Rólantsson in a World Cup qualifier against Austria in 2021.
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