Greenland’s futsal players string out in a line before angling their bodies to the left, facing the flag on the far wall. Nobody averts his gaze as the strains of their national anthem fill the hall. The red-and-white-halved banner, with its reverse-coloured semi‑circles, hangs comfortably among those of this week’s rivals. Scotland on the right, Morocco to the left; further along, there are even representations of Uefa and Fifa.
The moment always feels special. Their long-serving coach, Rene Olsen, has been imagining it for several days. His team also know these occasions, all too rare, are to be seized. “It gives me goosebumps,” Patrick Frederiksen, one of their stars, will say later. “It’s when you realise that it is time.”
It is Thursday morning and Greenland are about to face Romania, who are ranked 36 in the world. A few hours ago, Donald Trump has appeared to row back significantly on his threat to annex the territory after a week of rapidly escalating rhetoric. The backdrop, with the intense uncertainty it has instilled in a population of almost 57,000, is lost on nobody here.
The fact Greenland are in this impossibly scenic corner of Croatia, which has largely shut down for the winter, speaks loudly enough. Despite exhaustive efforts, they have yet to be admitted by one of the confederations governing football or futsal, the indoor five-a-side version of the game that dominates in their island’s harsh climate. They cannot play official matches or try to qualify for major tournaments. But Futsal Week, a privately run eight-team competition that Uefa and Fifa sanction, is a priceless opportunity to state their case against some of the elite. In football, they are restricted to games against non‑sovereign states.
This edition of Futsal Week was originally scheduled for the autumn. Its postponement to late January feels, albeit grimly, like serendipitous timing. “It’s hard to call it land, it’s a big piece of ice,” Trump said of Greenland during his screed at Davos. There are few international arenas in which Greenland can powerfully, visually show that for the demeaning fallacy it is. Olsen and his squad have the collective goal of recognition and self-assertion but no one is here to make vocal political statements. Their stories are powerfully human.
“Every time we travel it brings positive attention to Greenland,” says Frederiksen, who also captains the 11-a-side team. “We get more and more respect with each game, and people remember us. It gives us energy and strength to keep going. It’s confirmation that we are doing something great.”
Frederiksen, an imposing and technically adept 31-year-old, works full time at an orphanage in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. He is one of many squad members who work with youngsters; it is shown, to the untrained eye, by the care in their interactions. Rass Ikila Abelsen, who is 22 and idolised Frederiksen as a teenager, is training to be a teacher and will complete his course in two years.
“The young players I work with look up to me,” he says. “We always talk about football and futsal, and they ask me how they can become a member of the national team.”
Ikila Abelsen has, like his teammates, become a standard bearer and is fulfilling the dream of a childhood spent in Tasiilaq, a town of 1,800 residents on Greenland’s east coast. Getting to Nuuk requires a helicopter ride before changing on to an aeroplane. In winter, he and his friends would fashion goalposts from snow and play outside in temperatures as low as -20C (-4F). Sometimes he misses the fact that, with the internet connection unreliable, outdoor activity outdid phones or gaming.
Plenty of the 17-strong travelling party can tell similar tales. Their No 10, Aiko Nielsen, recently published a book about his rural upbringing. But the journey to Croatia has brought more prosaic challenges. Their luggage did not join them on the third and last of their flights here from Zagreb to Pula. It eventually turned up on Wednesday evening; the day’s training had taken place in whatever clothes they had to hand. Nobody is too fazed. “We are spontaneous, flexible people and we take that into the game,” Frederiksen says. “We have to be, because in Greenland the weather is in charge.”
The Romania match is viewed as a chance to set a marker. Greenland lost the sides’ previous meeting, in 2023, but keeping up with opponents who include a handful of professionals would further establish them as part of the furniture. Maybe other countries, reluctant to make the trip to Nuuk, will at least understand they would be well matched with a team barred from the official rankings. Futsal Week offers something beyond stern competition: the Greenland Football Association’s general secretary, Aqissiaq Ludvigsen, is in town and the networking opportunities are inescapable. Scotland’s presence piques the interest: perhaps Greenland could co-organise a tournament involving some of the home nations.
The anthem over, Greenland rip into Romania. Is there pent-up aggression, fury, however anyone might define it, to let out from the stress of recent weeks? That must remain supposition. Besides, there has been a long enough buildup given their last international game was at a tournament in Brazil, which represented a notable breakthrough, 10 months ago. This return to the arena has been some time in coming.
“We are fighters, it’s in our DNA,” Frederiksen says. “We yell, we show our emotions, we don’t hide them. If we’re disappointed, sad, happy, we show our energy. We let it all out every time, you can see it and feel it.”
Whatever is driving Greenland, it puts them 3-1 up by half-time. Players such as the rangy Angutivik Gundel-Collin, who recently came close to joining an Italian club, look deft, daring, dogged. The keeper, Aqqalooraq Ejvind Lund, is inspired and Romania are visibly rocked. “I hadn’t dreamed of a first half like we produced,” Olsen says. “I thought: ‘OK, they’re finally performing at the level we know they can.’” The bench erupts with each goal.
It savours a stunning fourth, flicked in after the best move of the game, and Greenland seem on for one of the best results in their history. Anybody logging into a stream from Zurich or Nyon might be suitably enthused. But they collapse in the latter stages, Romania’s 8-4 win owing much to futsal’s brutal penalty rules.
“Something happened that was hard to explain,” Olsen says. The emotions afterwards are, indeed, raw. Greenland were brilliant for two-thirds of the match and there is desolation they did not see it through.
Greenland spent years aiming to join Uefa but, as an autonomous territory of Denmark, found the way blocked when European football’s governing body forbade the acceptance of non-independent regions in 2013. Last year they had been optimistic of being admitted by Concacaf, the confederation for North, Central America and the Caribbean, only to be shocked when their application was unanimously rejected in June. It came after Trump had made his fixation with Greenland public and felt like a stomach punch.
“We thought that maybe it was time, maybe the dream was finally coming true,” Frederiksen says. “So it was really disappointing, but it’s just turned on a feeling inside us that we want to give even more when we travel. We were never going to start pointing fingers. We just said: ‘We need to work harder and come up with better plans, developing football and futsal in Greenland so we reach the point where someone has to accept us.’”
Efforts to achieve that continue inside football’s corridors of power. In the meantime every win helps. The quietly spoken Olsen, who has led the futsal team for more than a decade while running a graphic design company in Nuuk, lets his players choose their course. They will play Malta in a clash of quarter‑final losers on Friday and, as usual, the squad prepares by splitting into three groups.
These “chains” are broadly aligned with the players’ origins: north, south or Nuuk. Each will work on implementing a specific element of the gameplan Olsen has devised. “We want to nurse this group mentality,” Olsen says. “We try to educate them and then they can decide what action is best.”
They choose well. Within half a minute of kick-off against Malta they have scored twice through Nielsen, who flew in on Thursday afternoon after a holiday in Thailand. Nielsen is arguably the best player in Greenland’s 11-a-side league; he shrugs off any jet lag to score four times in a 6-2 win and the mood afterwards is elated. “This is what we work for,” Olsen smiles. On Sunday they will play Switzerland for fifth place.
The very dreams Trump has threatened to take away will stay alive. “My biggest wish is to play a home game in Nuuk against another country, in front of our own fans, all of Greenland together with us,” Ikila Abelsen says.
For Frederiksen, the potential of weeks such as this is limitless. “Whenever we get the chance to play, it’s all or nothing,” he says. “It means so much to us to change people’s perspectives.”
