On the night of 11 July 2021, Paceville filled with Italian flags. Italy had beaten England on penalties at Wembley to win Euro 2020, and the horns carried on well into the night in a country where plenty of people had spent the evening cheering for the other side.
Malta’s split between England and Italy is usually put down to the British connection on one side and the interwar language question on the other. Television had a lot to do with it too. Italian broadcasts from RAI reached the islands from 1957, five years before Malta had a television service of its own, and generations of Maltese fans grew up with Serie A and the Azzurri on an Italian channel.
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Ninety minutes, one shot
The waiting is the part of football that never makes it into a game. When Jake Grech scored in Helsinki last November, three minutes after coming off the bench, it was Malta’s only shot on target of the match. Finland 0, Malta 1, the country’s fourth win in World Cup qualifying. Casino games do the opposite, with cascading symbols and multipliers packing incidents into every few seconds.
The penalty shootout, the one part of football with a game’s tempo, was invented to replace the drawing of lots. Israel went out of the 1968 Olympic tournament that way, against Bulgaria, and Yosef Dagan and Michael Almog proposed penalties as a fairer tiebreak. The IFAB adopted the idea in 1970.
A ball made for television
The ball Adidas supplied for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico was called the Telstar, a name the company says was short for “television star”, and its black pentagons and white hexagons were meant to make it easier to follow on black-and-white sets. Among slot games online, the football-themed ones still use it, and so do most drawings of a football.
Designers use that ball for much the same reason Adidas drew it in 1970. A theme has to be recognised at a glance, before anyone has read a word on the screen, and very few objects say football faster. Broadcasting has since added its own shorthand, from the slow-motion replay to the pause while VAR checks a decision, which the IFAB wrote into the laws in March 2018. That summer’s World Cup in Russia was played with a new Telstar, its black-and-white design a nod to the 1970 ball, and it was the first World Cup to use VAR.
Plenty of those games are designed here. The Malta Gaming Authority puts the gaming sector’s gross value added at €1,422.0 million for 2025, around 6.3% of the economy before spillover effects and 8.2% with them, across 302 licensed companies holding 311 licences. It counted 171 business-to-business licences that year, the kind held by companies that design and supply games rather than run them.
Replays and memory
The National Stadium at Ta’ Qali seats 16,997 and was built on a Second World War airfield, and it took over from the Empire Stadium as the national team’s home in the early 1980s. Some of its biggest nights are remembered as much through the highlights as from the stand. One is the 2-1 win over Hungary in October 2006, when André Schembri scored both Malta goals, in the 13th and 52nd minutes of a Euro 2008 qualifier, and Sándor Torghelle got Hungary’s.
Malta played its first international on 24 February 1957 and lost 3-2 to Austria in Gżira, on a pitch of sand rather than grass. Six weeks earlier, pictures from Italian transmitters in Sicily had been picked up in Malta for the first time and shown in a shop window in Valletta. The MFA had been founded in 1900, but it only joined FIFA in 1959 and UEFA a year later.