The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht Rears its Ugly Head

Think back to your days in high school history class. You sat at your desk hoping the cute cheerleader sitting on the other side of the room wouldn’t notice your most recent acne outbreak. She always did. Damn her and her ilk. At least you had video games to keep you company on Saturday nights. All the while, your history teacher droned on and one about insignificant things like wars and speeches and presidents. Perhaps during your trip down memory lane you’ll even recall learning about the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. While the details might be fuzzy, surely it has played an important role in your post acne-filled life, right?

The 1713 Treaty of Ultrecht is once again dominating the headlines now that Spain is citing it in its effort to block Gibraltar from fielding a football team in the European championships. Gibraltar is hungry to have an international team that will lose to the likes of Malta and Andorra. Spain is not so hungry to have the tiny UK colony join in the reindeer games with Lichtenstein and Moldova. As a result, Spain is pulling out all the measures, including invoking a treaty that most people stopped caring about in, say, 1714.

The Spanish federation, which opposes Gibraltar’s bid, has sent documents to European soccer’s ruling body UEFA that say the U.K. colony’s only stadium is on land not recognized by the treaty, William Gaillard, a UEFA spokesman, said in a phone interview. UEFA executives will decide in a two-day meeting starting tomorrow whether to make Gibraltar a provisional member.

“I find it so ridiculous,” Joseph Nunez, president of Gibraltar’s soccer federation said in an interview. “There have been fields on the same piece of land since the 1890s and the existing stadium has been there since the 1960s.”

Clearly the framers of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht had the issue of international football in mind when they crafted the thing. At least that’s what I seem to recall from my history class. No wonder my grades were so average.

	Soccer Forums	Team/International Results

Category: Europe, World Football

Tags: 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Europe, Gibraltar, Spain, UEFA, World Football

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