In November last year in the world’s fifth-smallest country San Marino, a new exhibition opened in the national museum charting the nation’s footballing heritage titled “challenging the impossible”.
Within a week, staff were already planning for an expansion when the lowest of all FIFA’s 210-ranked nations completed that challenge somewhat faster than anyone expected.
On November 18, San Marino secured promotion from the fourth and bottom tier of the Nations League with a 3-1 win in Liechtenstein to pique the interest not only of visitors to the Titanus Museum, but much of Europe.
The part-time footballers, full-time plumbers, shop workers – and graphic designers, in the case of most-capped player Matteo Vitaioli – were making national news around the continent. Move over Spain, this is San Marino’s moment.
A country which had spent 20 years waiting to add to the one victory it had ever recorded racked up two in just over a month to win their group ahead of Liechtenstein and Gibraltar, who had held Romania and Wales respectively earlier in 2024.
Not everyone needed alerting to San Marino’s shock ascension. The micro-state had already become a cult figure further afield, with a growing number of onlookers entertained by the fortunes of a country where even scoring a goal, of which they had managed just 33 in their entire history, remained a novelty.
Much of their growing casual following was fed by ‘San Marino Fan Account’, which has racked up almost 200,000 followers on X since June 2019 posting tongue-in-cheek optimistic, borderline fanatical and most consistently block-capital takes during each of the country’s games, always adamant that San Marino’s next opponents will be made to pay for their latest defeat.
“WE WRITE HISTORY BY SCORING THREE MATCHES IN A ROW,” was one such particularly enthusiastic example in November 2023 and accumulated more than two million views, after San Marino had finished their Euro 2024 qualifying group by losing every game.
Fittingly, the mysterious unnamed figure behind the account was inspired to set it up because he couldn’t find anywhere else posting English updates on San Marino’s fortunes.
“I’m interested in footballing micro-states, but San Marino always had and has a special place in my heart,” he tells Sky Sports. “When San Marino score, I normally get about 5,000 extra followers.
“It doesn’t get much, if any recognition from inside the country. But that’s fine, the players have to concentrate on making the nation proud. X is not really a thing in Italy nor San Marino, so I think they barely realise the love they get online.”
With the keyboard-mashing tweets of joy normally accompanying those consolation goals, or if they were very fortunate an occasional goalless draw, no-one inside or out of the country was prepared for any genuine success.
Across four matches between September and November, San Marino picked up a first ever competitive victory, added a second with their debut away win, and enjoyed their finest hour in November in Liechtenstein, coming from behind to win 3-1 and send the largest shockwaves you can fit through a country slightly larger than Middlesbrough.
“It’s a beautiful emotion after all those years of defeats,” stalwart Vitaioli tells Sky Sports, still emotional almost a month on. “We were welcomed as heroes in San Marino. It was incredible.”
Aged 17, he became San Marino’s youngest ever player in 2007 and is now the squad’s elder statesman at 35 after 103 caps, 97 losses, five draws and, following a five-minute cameo at the end of that Liechtenstein game, one win – almost an entire career in the making.
“It is something so big for us that perhaps we still haven’t understood what really happened,” he adds. “It repays all the sacrifices we have made in all these years.
“We knew we were playing well, but to get promoted to the next league up – that still felt like a dream. But sometimes, dreams come true, especially if you never give up.”
All the manifestation in San Marino could not make a country’s dream come true on its own. Two-hundred and fifty miles away from the home of the Pope, divine intervention felt a more realistic support. Or, as it turned out, UEFA.
The governing body’s brain child, the Nations League, has levelled the playing field for smaller countries, and not before time.
In two qualifying tournaments before the inaugural competition launched in 2018, the Sammarinese had conceded 90 goals and scored three times in 20 matches, picking up a solitary draw against Estonia.
But that new platform alone cannot explain their ascent either. San Marino’s Nations League group four years ago also contained Liechtenstein and Gibraltar, and they finished bottom with two draws and two losses. They conceded only three times, but did not manage a single goal themselves.
The main roots of their moment in the sun stretch back a decade to a UEFA-funded investment in infrastructure including a generational revamp of the national stadium and a new hub for the San Marino Academy, which operates youth sides up to U19 level. Seven of the most-recent San Marino squad are graduates.
“UEFA’s support has been crucial,” San Marino FA president Marco Tura said after their Nations League triumph. “It changed our mentality and vision of football.
“UEFA guided us in every step of our organisational and technical development, enabling us to raise football’s level not just economically but also structurally and technically.”
One thing UEFA could not supply was the right manager to take advantage of the brightest crop of young players the country has ever produced.
Fabrizio Costantini laid much of the ground work after stepping up from the U21s to the national side in 2022, lowering the average age of the squad considerably and briefly equalising against Denmark in October last year before Yussuf Poulsen’s winner averted the mother of all shocks and one broken caps lock.
His successor, Roberto Cevoli, has taken things to new heights, naming the youngest average international line-up across Europe in 2024.
The rewards have not taken long to bear fruit with 24-year-old Nicola Nanni the standout star of this Nations League campaign, netting a last-minute penalty to earn a draw in Gibraltar in their penultimate match before scoring to complete the turnaround in Vaduz last month.
“All credit has to go to the manager’s approach,” Vitaioli adds. “He has been a real breath of fresh air and brought new motivation to the team.”
In all likelihood, this will be as good as it gets for Sammarinese, given Albania, Finland and potentially Slovakia – all sides who have qualified for recent tournaments – await them in League C of the 2026/27 Nations League.
By then, there is still a chance as small as the country itself that a place at the 2026 World Cup might be on the cards.
Four Nations League group winners who finish outside of the top two in their World Cup qualifying groups will be added into the play-offs next November for one of four spots in the finals.
There is a realistic chance San Marino may be among them, though them winning two more games to make it to the USA, Canada and Mexico feels little more than a dream. But then – that’s how they got here in the first place.
