The home team may have lost 7-0, but that did not really bother them. What mattered most was their shirts — because they bore the Occitane cross, the symbol of France's southern provinces where a movement is under way to demand autonomy from the country's highly centralised State.

The team for L'Occitanie saw their loss to Samiland as a small step forwards in the long struggle to reclaim an identity crushed by centuries of Parisian dominance.

Occitania — which covers the breadth of southern France, from the Atlantic coast to the Alps — wants to use the beautiful game to put itself on the world map. “Our aim is to get L'Occitanie known abroad,” said Pèire Costa, chairman of the Occitane Football Federation.

This month its players will begin their attempt to fulfil that ambition with two days of training in preparation for the Viva World Cup, a competition for nations not recognised as sovereign states.

If they qualify — and the issue is in doubt because their application arrived late — they will meet the likes of Kurdistan, northern Cyrpus and Biafra this summer.

The Samis, the indigenous people of Finland, Sweden and Norway, will be among the favourites at the event, being hosted by Padania, the northern Italian region.

“The matches are bitterly disputed,” said Mr Costa. “But there is no hatred between teams; quite the contrary. We have games of three halves: the first two take place on the pitch and the third around a table with a glass of wine.”

Occitania's players are all amateurs, mostly with clubs between the fourth and sixth divisions of the French league. They are selected not so much for their technical or tactical skills as for their ability to speak Occitane — a severe restriction since only about a quarter of the population of the region masters la langue d'Oc.

Almost 500 years after regional tongues were banned by King François I, who made French the official language of his land, Occitania's partisans are determined to press their case for greater cultural, economic and political rights.

They won a significant victory last summer when the French parliament changed the Constitution to describe regional languages as part of the nation's heritage.

The likes of Mr Costa hope that this will prove to be an initial move towards the sort of autonomy enjoyed by Scotland and Wales.

His detractors say that Occitania has no historic legitimacy and is an artificial invention — the word has been used only for the past century or so — bringing together regions that have their own dialects and scant common history.

Useful phrases

— The referee is blind L'arbitre es òrb

— Sack the manager Fotètz defòra l'entrenaire

— It was a dive A cabussat

— We got hammered Se sèm preses una rosta

— He is the new Pelé Es lo novèl Pelé

— We are rubbish Macarèl, coma sèm marrits

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