Underdog Stories / Football history

How Tibetan Football Teams Bring a Diaspora Together

How do Tibetan football teams bring the diaspora together? School pitches, local cups and national shirts give scattered communities a reason to meet and play.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · October 2, 2026

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On July 1, 2022, Tibet’s women played Sápmi on a school ground in a Tibetan settlement in India. They lost 13–1. Ngawang Oetso scored Tibet’s goal, and the settlement had hosted the first CONIFA Women’s World Football Cup.

That school ground helps answer how Tibetan football teams bring the diaspora together. Local tournaments give people from different settlements somewhere to meet. Training camps turn those players into teammates. Representative matches give their families a shared shirt to follow, even when the team has no permanent home ground.

In the episode “Tibetan National Teams: The Clubs That Carry a People” on Why We Love This Club, host Chris Horwedel starts with Oetso’s goal. He says that, as a schoolgirl five years earlier, she had told a film crew she dreamed of wearing a Team Tibet shirt. By 2022, she was wearing one in a world tournament.

How do Tibetan football teams bring the diaspora together?

Start with the problem a fixture solves. Tibetan communities are spread across India, Nepal and farther afield. China governs Tibet; after the 1959 uprising, the Dalai Lama fled to India, where exile communities built schools and other institutions. Football gave people in those communities another reason to gather.

The teams work at two levels. A settlement side can bring its players and supporters to a cup. A representative squad can draw players from several settlements and take their name abroad. Someone who has never met a player can still recognize the shirt.

There is also an awkward truth here. Tibet’s men and women cannot enter FIFA World Cup qualifying. Their international games depend on invitations and tournaments outside FIFA. The Tibetan National Sports Association, based in Dharamsala, runs camps and selects representative teams, but it cannot hand them a regular international calendar.

Horwedel puts the everyday task plainly: “People have to keep making reasons to meet.” A cup date can do that. So can a week of training, though getting players to the same pitch takes more work when they live in different countries.

Where did the Memorial Gold Cup begin?

The Gyalyum Chenmo Memorial Gold Cup began in October 1981 on the grounds of Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala. Joe Tsering, a staff member there, helped organize it in memory of Dickyi Tsering, the Dalai Lama’s mother. The first ground was a school ground.

Teams came from Tibetan settlements across India and Nepal. The cup gave players a serious match to prepare for, then brought their communities together to watch it. For people whose relatives and friends lived elsewhere, the trip offered time together that lasted longer than the game.

Horwedel says the score matters, “but the gathering matters much more.” That sounds generous until you think about how a cup works. Teams need opponents, hosts and people willing to travel. Each edition makes a meeting that would not happen on its own.

The Tibetan National Sports Association was founded in 2002. The link is direct: local competition gives players matches, while national camps bring selected players together, and the cup keeps going between international call-ups, when there may be no foreign opponent waiting.

What happened when Tibet played Greenland in 2001?

On June 30, 2001, Tibet played Greenland in Copenhagen. Tibet scored first through Lobsang Norbu, a school gym teacher. Greenland won 4–1. The match gave the exiled Tibetan squad a widely documented game against another representative side outside FIFA.

Horwedel briefly says “2021” when recounting that fixture. Match records put it 20 years earlier, on June 30, 2001. There is another wrinkle in calling it Tibet’s first match: the sports association says a Tibetan representative team had already played in Bologna, Italy, in 1999. Copenhagen was the match that drew far wider attention.

Danish organizer Michael Nybrandt helped arrange the Greenland game. Bringing the Tibetan players together meant finding them across scattered communities and dealing with travel papers before they could train as a squad. Beijing objected to the fixture, yet it went ahead. Norbu’s goal came from an ordinary job back at a school into a match people could follow.

Horwedel is right to linger on that goal without calling the defeat a win. Greenland scored four times. Both parts of the record matter.

The men later reached the 2018 CONIFA World Football Cup in London. Tibet drew 1–1 with United Koreans in Japan in their final placement match. Then it lost the shootout 4–1. CONIFA gave them opponents and a run of fixtures. It also showed how hard it was for a squad with limited time together to keep pace.

“People have to keep making reasons to meet.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

How did Tibetan women build their own football program?

The women’s story starts with a missing picture. In 2010, American teacher Cassie Childers visited a Tibetan football history exhibition in Dharamsala and saw little sign of women players. She approached the sports association about starting a program for girls.

Early camps brought teenagers from Tibetan schools together to train. Some had little experience of the game. They needed room to practice and other players to practice with. The program also had to persuade people that girls belonged on the field in the first place.

Horwedel recounts a women’s match at the Memorial Gold Cup in 2012. A player he calls Lamothe scored and celebrated with a flip. Spectators who had doubted the women stopped laughing, Childers later recalled. It is a lovely detail, though a goal cannot supply all the coaching or money a team needs.

In 2015, Childers’s Tibet Women’s Soccer became independent of the national sports association. The distinction matters. Those players and organizers helped build women’s football in their own program; their work should not disappear into the story of the later association-run squad.

That year, seven senior players traveled to a women’s football festival in Berlin. The event mixed players from different backgrounds onto shared teams, including Tibetan and Chinese women. The women could meet as fellow players for a week, even while the dispute over Tibet remained well beyond the pitch.

Travel was less straightforward in 2017. Fifteen members of Tibet Women’s Soccer were refused U.S. visas before a trip to a tournament in Texas. An invitation and weeks of preparation could not get them to kickoff.

Why did Tibet host the 2022 women’s tournament?

CONIFA, which organizes football for teams outside FIFA, held its first Women’s World Football Cup in Paonta Cholsum, a Tibetan settlement in India. Tibet’s sports association hosted. Two other announced sides withdrew, leaving Tibet to play Sápmi twice.

Sápmi won both games. It won 13–1 on July 1 and 9–0 on July 3. Its players earned the first title. CONIFA records Ngawang Oetso as Tibet’s scorer in the opening match, the team’s first international goal in that tournament.

Horwedel describes an exhibition about exile beside the school ground, along with local cultural dances during the event. People could come for the match. They could spend time with the settlement hosting it, too. For the Tibetan team, it was an unusual chance to welcome an international opponent to a place where its own community lived.

The losses were heavy. A side that gives up 22 goals in two games has work to do on the field, and playing at home does not change that. Hosting still required people to prepare a ground and receive visitors. It gave the women a fixture in front of their own community, with Oetso’s name on the scoresheet.

Horwedel says, “A 13-1 loss needn’t be rewritten as a victory to matter.” He leaves Sápmi its title. Tibet’s goal remains Tibet’s goal.

Where do Tibetan teams play between national matches?

Most players spend far more time away from the representative squad than with it. The association’s women’s camp brings players from settlements in India and Nepal together for training and national-team selection. Its men’s camp does similar work. Neither camp can replace regular matches.

Schools and community cups help fill the gaps. In 2025, the association held its first under-15 Tongtsen Cup at the Upper Tibetan Children’s Village ground. Boys and girls played for their schools; TCV Suja won the girls’ final. In March 2026, Munsel won the women’s Chikdril Gold Cup at Mundgod.

The fixtures give younger players something to train for. Older players get another chance to compete, and families are asked to turn up at a school or settlement ground, as they have for the Memorial Gold Cup since 1981. The association has chapters in Chicago, New York, Toronto and the United Kingdom, extending that work to communities farther away.

There is no single stadium holding all of this together. One week the important ground is in Mundgod. Another time it is a school pitch in Paonta Cholsum. Someone still has to find the players, make the fixture and mark the field.

The full episode of Why We Love This Club is on Underdog Podcasts, with the rest of the network's shows.