It’s a commonly held belief in professional sports that visiting teams automatically have a disadvantage. They have to deal with rowdy crowds who often hate their guts, a dearth of supporters in the stadium, hotel living and sleeping, and the discomfort of planes and buses.
There are a lot of reasons as to why playing an away game is not ideal but just imagine having to play a road game that is 21,303 miles (for our non-American readers, I’ll spare you the mental math calculations and just tell you that’s a whopping 17,142km) round trip.
Such was the journey that New Caledonian side AS Magenta made to play French club Trélissac FC in 2014. New Caledonia is a former French colony and land France has retained as an “oversea department and territory.”
With this status, AS Magenta and all the other clubs who reign supreme in once-French-owned, tiny nations are allowed to participate in French Cup competition. These teams enter in the seventh round of the Coupe de France when amateur and non-amateur sides face off against those in the higher tiers.