Founded | 2006 |
---|---|
Abolished | 2012 |
Region | International (NF-Board) |
Last champions | Iraqi Kurdistan (2012) |
Most successful team(s) |
Padania (3 titles) |
The VIVA World Cup was an international association football tournament organized by the New Federation Board, an umbrella association for teams unaffiliated with FIFA, held five times between 2006 and 2012.
The oldest precedent of the VIVA World Cup was the Alternative Worldwide Cup of 1988, developed in Jordan.
In April 2005, the NF-Board announced that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus had been chosen to host the inaugural VIVA World Cup, having successfully hosted the KTFF 50th Anniversary Cup, a tournament to celebrate 50 years of the Cyprus Turkish Football Federation, featuring fellow NF-Board member Sápmi and FIFA-unaffiliated Kosovo. The NF-Board hoped that sixteen teams would take part, drawn from across its membership.
In spring 2005, the new government elected in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (KTFF) was keen to foster relations with other nations. The NF-Board claim that the government of Ferdi Sabit Soyer insisted on restricting which teams could and could not take part in order to head off potential political arguments. For their part, the KTFF claim that the NF-Board made unreasonable financial demands.
The upshot of this was that the NF-Board decided to grant the hosting rights for the tournament to Occitania. In response, the KTFF announced that they would hold their own tournament, the ELF Cup, scheduled for the same time as the VIVA World Cup. Some NF-Board members accepted the invitations to take part in the ELF Cup.
Occitania announced that the tournament would still be held on 19–25 November 2006, with games played in and around Hyères les Palmiers, near Toulon. The number of entrants was reduced to eight, in anticipation of the ELF Cup (which agreed to pay expenses) drawing NF-Board members away from the VIVA World Cup. A lack of suitable competitors meant that the tournament was to include six teams: Monaco, the Romani, the Sápmi, Southern Cameroons, West Papua, and the Occitania national football teams.