There’s now a love for Bristol City on a remote Pacific island
Spurs fan Matt Conrad (right) and Bristol City fan and Bristolian football journalist Paul Watson are winning awards for their documentary movie The Soccermen, about their adventures in the tiny Micronesian island of Pohnpei, as they try to restart the island’s national football team(Image: The Soccermen)
A film about a Bristol City fan who decided to try to become an international football manager – by organising what was described as the ‘worst football team in the world’ – has become a huge hit, scooping praise and awards at film festivals all over the world.
The film is called The Soccermen and was originally made more than 12 years ago, but has now been properly completed and released and is winning awards and selections at film festivals from Las Vegas to Slovenia.
The documentary movie tells the story of two friends – Bristol’s Paul Watson and his friend Matthew Conrad – who decided to see if they could be good enough to play international football. That led fairly quickly to them taking on the job of managing the national team of the Micronesian island nation of Pohnpei.
The issue was that Pohnpei didn’t really have a national team, or indeed any team, except some enthusiastic islanders who loved football and wanted to play. When Paul – the brother of Bristol comedian Mark Watson – and Matthew arrived, they had to find enough players, train them and set them up for their first win.
That was back in 2009 and, over the course of the next 18 months, Paul and assistant manager Matthew set up a footballing base in Pohnpei and filmed their journey – from the first training session where one player in an England shirt turned up, to getting a squad together to go to another neighbouring country and win.
The documentary they made of their story was initially put together to accompany a 2012 book, called ‘Up Pohnpei!’, but has now been completed, properly produced and released as a feature-length film in 2025.
Spurs fan Matt Conrad and Bristol City fan and Bristolian football journalist Paul Watson are winning awards for their documentary movie The Soccermen, about their adventures in the tiny Micronesian island of Pohnpei, as they try to restart the island’s national football team – a still from the movie(Image: The Soccermen)
“We both love soccer enough to let it get the better of us,” explained Matthew. “In 2009, after a few too many cups of tea, we had the crazy idea to ditch the drudgery of life and pursue our dream of playing international soccer. One problem: Who would take us? Neither of us were what you would call ‘talented’.
“A few more cups of tea and some Googling later we found the island of Pohnpei, a tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean. Pohnpei had never won a game and were called ‘the worst team in the world.’ Perfect! – we thought. Let’s grab a camera, pop over to the other side of the world, wow the locals with some kick-ups, play a game, win and become local legends forever!”
It wasn’t exactly that simple. “We had to go and knock on people’s doors to get them to play,” Paul told The Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast. “This island seems to reject football. Everything we do just makes things worse. You plan a training session, think it’s going to go great, and the heavens will open and everything just washes away.”
Thanks to Paul, there’s now a love for Bristol City on the remote Pacific island, which he brought over alongside Matthew’s Spurs shirts. “You’ll see Bristol City shirts all over the place. Our goalkeeper’s in a Bristol City shirt, me and Matt and are basically colonising with Bristol City and Spurs.
“But also we wrote to every single club in England and asked for kit, and a weird selection of clubs said ‘yes’. So there’s Yeovil Town, Norwich – I’ll forgive them for Liam Manning – so if you go around Pohnpei now you’ll see an old guy with a Yeovil Town shirt on.
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“And the reason for that is we’ll have given it out to one of the players, and because of the hierarchical society, you have to give everything to an older relative. So we gave out shin pads, which was totally useless, because as soon as the players went home with them, an older relative was taking them and using them. Sometimes you’ll see a fisherman with shinpads on,” he told The Guardian.
“The film is called the Soccermen because that’s what the people there would call us to explain why were there,” he added.
Recalling the moment they touched down on the island after a 48-hour flight, Matthew said: “It was unlike anything we had ever seen. It was beautiful, very weird and everyone was staring at us. We bee-lined to team practice anxious to meet our new team-mates. But lo and behold – there was no team at all!
“From this moment our mission became clear: Help Pohnpei create something pure and noble to call their own – a team capable of competing and winning their first game. Away from the over-commercialised trappings and glitz of the modern game, we had the chance to do something truly grassroots. Our mission became an obsession.
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“But, building a team in the middle of nowhere in the stifling heat and driving rain with no funding is no easy feat. Especially on a waterlogged field inhabited by hundreds of toads and dogs. Recruiting players and bridging the enormous cultural gap to instil a professional discipline needed to compete at international level wasn’t any easier.
“Our star player was run over and almost killed by a drunk driver, our funding repeatedly fell through, I got third-degree sun burns, Paul got boils – yes boils – and we didn’t have a working toilet.
“Nevertheless, inspired by our players, many of whom walked miles to and from training in the pummelling rain, we flew them off the island (in many cases for their first time) to face island rivals and Pacific soccer powerhouses, Guam in Pohnpei’s first competitive game in decades,” he added.
Among its accolades so far since its release, the film won the audience award for ‘best documentary’ at the Golden State Film Festival in Los Angeles, the award for ‘best director’ of a documentary feature at Indie Vegas Film Festival and also had an honourable mention at the International Sports Film Festival in Slovenia.