Gianlucian football association (Pacifica)

Gianlucian football association

Founded	14 December 1896 (1896-12-14)
Headquarters	Südtor
President	Frank Büsching (2008-)
Website	www.gif.gi

The Gianlucian football association (Alman: Gianlucischer Fußballbund), mostly abbreviated as GIF, is the governing body of football in GI-Land. The GIF's headquarters are located in Südtor. The organisation of the Gianlucian football league's top divisions, the national teams and the three Gianlucian trophy cups lay within the responsibility of the association. Since 2008 Frank Büsching, a former national player of the Gianlucian national team born 1963 in Günitz, is president of the GIF.

History

In May 1896 the parliament of the Gianlucian Empire was instructed by Emperor Gianluca III to develop a law with the goal of binding popular sports clubs to the nation. The monarch was deeming this necessary as many sports clubs were affiliated to a political ideology, mostly social democracy or anti-monarchist liberalism. With the new law people were supposed to not form potentially harmful political opinions anymore, but instead strengthen their love for their country by joining sports clubs as a patriotic act.

With opposition of the Republicans and the Social Democrats a law proposal got written by a right-wing coalition of parties loyal to the monarch, which would be passed by the Emperor on 14 December 1896. The Gianlucian sport association law has founded the ten biggest sport associations in GI-Land back then, including the GIF. The GIF's role was to unite all clubs in its association as well as passing and executing rules of conduct each football club had to abide to. Those rules not only included a duty of each member to hold up Gianlucian values like punctuality and order, but also that any coach and player in the team needed to prove their best attitude towards the emperor and the empire itself. If a club member fell short of proving this, the club had to ban this member. The member could get pardoned, oftentimes through enduring physical punishment.
A few clubs, often affiliated to the social democrats, were opposing the idea of becoming an associate in the GIF and abiding to the harsh rule book. Those clubs' meetings were dissolved by police forces at first before they were officially banned in 1898. The attempt of continuing to run those anti-GIF clubs in secret was unsuccessful, as the members, who tried to do that, were either incarcerated or heavily threatened, sometimes by use of physical violence. In 1899 there were no football clubs existing anymore, which were not part of the GIF.

Another task of the newly found organisation was to create "a team of brave Gianlucians", as the emperor has put it, who will assert "dominance all over the world". The first game of the Gianlucian national team of football was played against a selection of amateur players from Frost and was lost 2-4 in 1897. In the following years the empire was not able to assert dominance over their foreign rivals in football at least.
This became a problem for first president and monarchist politician Heiner Lurig (1855-1924), who was lifted from his position in 1907 after yet another loss against Snolland. The following presidents and subsequently their designated coaches for the national team were not able to get Gianlucaland on top of the global landscape of football either, which is why it steadily lost popularity at the court, which also led to divestment from the state and thus to many clubs dying out. In the end the support was not even enough for the GIF itself, which was dissolved during the dictatorship making the associated clubs "free clubs" again.

When Queen Charlotte I was coronated, her brother Peter was the main driving force in reflourishing the defunct GIF once again and making it a member of the Sedunnic found IUFA. This time the GIF was expressedly not a political organisation, but an association determining and streamlining the rules of football in GI-Land and organising the different football tournaments within GI-Land. Physical punishments for breaking the rules of the rule book were abolished and the executive board of the GIF was very keen in participating in the very first FWC the IUFA was planning in 1956 to hold in Sedunn. The only major success of the GIF's national team in the early years of the world cup was a fourth place during the 1964 IUFA FWC.

During the reign of Queen Charlotte I the emancipation of women was starting to move forward. Not only were women entitled to vote as of the foundation of the republic, but they also wanted to officially join and participate in clubs of sports like football or fencing, which were men exclusive until the 60s. In 1974 the first season of the women's Nationalliga (national league) was played out and the sport slowly gained as much popularity as the men's football, especially since women's football was seen as more elegant and flexible.

In mid 1980 the idea of founding a women's national team was brought to the public's attention by GIF's department for women's football. While president Harry Grünspahn (1912-1988) was against the idea at first, the pressure from the public and from the football clubs within the association got too high, so in 1981 he gave in and founded the first Gianlucian women's national football team. His successor, André Borger (1937-2019), went a step further and suggested, together with a handful of other football association presidents, the introduction of a women's world cup similar to the IUFA FWC, making GI-Land a driving force in establishing this tournament. In 1990 the first IUFA WFWC in Sedunn was won by the Gianlucian national team by defeating Omega 2-0.

The following years both national teams were only playing on an average level and the Gianlucian leagues were also not seen as very profitable. This changed in the early 2010s, when two former national players, Gianluc Treyn and Lena Karanta, signed their contracts as head coaches of the national teams. In the seven tournaments between 2014 and 2020 GI-Land was finishing in the tournaments as the champion three times, as runner-up once and was an additional time moving into the knockout stage.