May 31 – It isn’t the biggest TV deal ever done and it isn’t the biggest football tournament on the planet, but it nevertheless is still national team football, even if the nations are unrecognised.
Football streaming network MyCujoo has agreed a multi-year partnership with the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (CONIFA) to stream its tournaments starting tomorrow in Artsakh – the Armenian-populated region of Nagorno Karabakh that declared its independence from Azerbaijan unilaterally in 1991 – with the CONIFA Sportsbet.io European Football Cup.
The coverage will also include the 2020 CONIFA World Football Cup to be held Somaliland, and the inaugural CONIFA Women’s World Football Cup.
The broadcast deal doesn’t involve a big rights fee but has been done on a shared revenue basis
and includes exclusive digital media rights to stream the competition (excluding the host ‘nation’) and competition data rights.
CONIFA represents football associations in states, minorities, stateless peoples and regions unaffiliated with FIFA.
MyCujoo CEO, Pedro Presa, said: “We like to think that MyCujoo is the natural home for an organisation like CONIFA. Our vision is to create a network of football players and football fans where everyone belongs – no matter where they are or where the come from. People talk a lot about football being a common language but at MyCujoo, we are doing something about it. We’re building the infrastructure which a community like CONIFA and its members need.”
The eight unrecognised nations competing in the European tournament who have found a home on MyCujoo are:
- Artsakh
- Abkhazia – a de facto nation on the east coast of the Black Sea.
- Padania – a region spanning the Po Valley in Northern Italy.
- Székely Land – an area in Romania, inhabited mainly by the Szeklers, a subgroup of the Hungarian people from eastern Transylvania.
- Sapmi – who represent the Sami People that inhabit the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
- Western Armenia – the western part of the Armenian Highlands, a territory nowadays situated in Turkey.
- Chameria – an area in Greece, inhabited mainly by the Cham, a subgroup of the Albanian people from the region of Epirus.
- South Ossetia – a de facto nation in the Caucasus.
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