Football has been a regular event at the Pacific Games, the multi-sports event for Pacific nations, territories and dependencies, since 1963.
Since 1971 the competition has been held every four years, but was not played in 1999 due to contract issues. Since 2007, the men's competition has doubled as OFC's preliminary qualifying competition for the FIFA World Cup.
A women's tournament was first introduced in 2003, and has doubled up as the preliminary qualifying competition for the Olympic Games since 2007.
Famous quotes containing the words football, pacific and/or games:
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.... It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The rules of drinking games are taken more serious than the rules of war.”
—Chinese proverb.