Paul Watson

Paul C. Watson (born 1984) is a British writer and football coach. Once a semi-professional footballer himself, he is best known for serving as coach of the Pohnpei State football team and Federated States of Micronesia national football team in 2009 and 2010, an experience about which he wrote the 2012 book Up Pohnpei. He later moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to assist in the founding of a new team, Bayangol FC. In 2018, Watson was the lead organiser and tournament director for the CONIFA World Football Cup in London for nations, states and peoples not recognised by FIFA. Early life and career Watson was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He grew up in Shirehampton and Henleaze, and is a Bristol City F.C. fan. His brother Mark Watson is a comedian. He studied Italian language at the University of Leeds. He would go on to become a sports journalist on the Channel 4 programme Football Italia. Coaching on Pohnpei In 2007, Watson and his friend Matt Conrad began looking into the possibility of becoming international footballers by joining a poorly-performing foreign team. At the time, Watson was working on a documentary about the world's weakest football teams. They started their internet research by looking at the results of the team at the bottom of the FIFA rankings at the time, the Guam national football team, and then trying to find which non-FIFA teams Guam had beaten – most notably, the Yap football team with a score of 7–1 – before setting their sights on the sole team which Yap had ever beaten: Pohnpei State Football Team. Unfortunately for Watson and Conrad, playing for a team in the Federated States of Micronesia would require them to first qualify for naturalisation under the country's strict nationality laws by marrying local women, learning a local language, and living in the country for five years, so they had to give up on that idea. However, the pair soon after decided that they could pursue a similar dream of becoming international football coaches instead, and got in touch with former Pohnpei coach Charles Musana, who had coincidentally just moved to London and initially thought the pair's query was part of a prank. Following two years of negotiations with Micronesian sports officials, Watson was eventually offered the coaching job, and took up his new post in August 2009; he stated that because he "had played to a reasonable standard in England", they were convinced he could perform adequately in his new role.