Why Malta is the most interesting country in the world to watch a World Cup from
The island fractures into a hundred different loyalties that have accumulated over generations
Somewhere in Valletta, someone is on their second beer watching a match between two countries they have no particular connection to, and are absolutely gripped by it. This is not unusual. It is the default mode of Maltese football fandom, and it has been that way since 1957 when the national team played their first international and lost 2-3 to Austria in front of a packed Empire Stadium. Nearly seven decades years later, the Maltese are still watching other people's World Cups. They have become very good at it.
The numbers behind the qualifying record are worth sitting with for a second. Since 1974, Malta have entered every single World Cup qualifying campaign. 116 matches played. Three wins. Not three wins in a campaign. Three wins total, across five decades. The Maltese population don’t actually talk about the wins. The stories that get passed around in conversation are where the Malta team made a good team uncomfortable. The Portugal draw of 2 all in 1987, the pre-2000 Euro friendly match where England barely scraped by. Those are examples of exactly that.
What makes the whole thing genuinely strange is that the football betting odds on every World Cup match, from the opening games through to the final, are being set largely by companies headquartered in Malta, regulated by the Malta Gaming Authority, staffed by people who live on the island. Over 300 gaming companies hold MGA licences. The sector employs more than 12,000 people and accounts for roughly 12% of Maltese GDP. Football betting is the most popular market, accounting for 81.2% of all bets placed by Maltese players. The infrastructure that prices up a World Cup final, which calculates the odds on who wins the Golden Boot, runs substantially through an island whose national team has three qualifying wins in fifty years. BoyleSports runs football betting markets across tournaments like this one as part of a wider sports offering. The Maltese team sits at 167th in the world rankings. Both things are true about the same place at the same time and nobody on the island seems to find it particularly remarkable anymore.
How a country without a team picks its team
The absence of a national side in the tournament has produced something genuinely interesting in terms of how Maltese people follow the game. Without a default allegiance, the island fractures into a hundred different loyalties that have accumulated over generations. Italy runs deep, through historical proximity, through diaspora, through decades of Serie A on Maltese television before streaming made everything available. England has a pull that comes from colonial history and never quite left. Brazil turns up in every other bar. Argentina turns up in the others. The arguments between the two factions have nothing to do with either country and everything to do with who had who in a sweepstake years ago and has never moved on.
The expat community adds another layer. Malta is small enough, and internationally connected enough, that for the latter stages of any major tournament almost every remaining nation has supporters somewhere on the island following the game as if their national team is still in it because for them it is. A Scandinavian watching with Maltese colleagues. A French expat surrounded by people who switched allegiance because their original pick went out in the group stage. The World Cup becomes a distributed loyalty experiment, where not having a team in the World Cup has produced something more varied and more interesting than having one might have.
The long game
The Malta Football Association was founded in 1900, which predates FIFA. Football arrived with the British military in the 1880s, took hold fast, and the organisational structures followed before most of the world had formalised the sport at all. The gap between that founding date and a current ranking of 167th is one of the more quietly absurd facts in international football, though you would not say that to anyone at the MFA.
The Nations League has been the most positive development in recent memory. Malta won their D group in 2024 and got promoted to League C. Five places gained in the FIFA rankings that same year, from 172nd to 167th. None of this sounds like much written down. In the context of a team that spent years losing 7-0 in World Cup qualifying to opponents ranked sixty places above them, it is the closest thing to momentum Maltese football has had in a long time.
The coach said never say never about qualifying for a major tournament. He has a point, technically. The record suggests it will be some time yet. Until then, the island watches, the betting companies count the wagers, and someone somewhere is passionately invested in a match that has nothing to do with Malta and everything to do with a habit built across seventy years of watching from the outside.
Disclaimer: Play responsibly. Players must be over 18. For help visit https://www.rgf.org.mt/.