Take Tibet: it covers an area twice the size of France, including part of the world's highest mountain, and has a culture as old as time; yet there is no place for it in that fiercely-contested barometer of national status, the FIFA/Coca-Cola World Ranking, where fragments of territory such as Montserrat (area: 39 square miles) rub shoulders with San Marino (area: 23.6 square miles).

And it was not just me thinking deep geopolitical thoughts among the back-heels and bicycle kicks in the suburban London stadium where the matches were staged.

"It is interesting the different ways these guys define themselves," commented one visiting Exeter City fan.

"Would it be so far-fetched to have a Zulu nation?" asked another.

Welcome to the World Football Cup, a biennial competition under the auspices of the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (CONIFA), which constitutes one of the few opportunities for the players taking part to represent their communities in a form of international competition.

There are 16 teams in all - Tuvalu, Matabeleland and Panjab are among the others - and the tournament takes in a swath of London's commuter-land, from Bromley in the east to Bracknell in the west.

It will all be over in a flash: the competition began last week and Abkhazia's successors as champions will be crowned on Saturday (June 9).

As tournament director Paul Watson explained to me, quite apart from the cost to teams of a prolonged stay in the UK capital, the available window between England's second-tier Championship play-off game and the FIFA World Cup was short.

In a detail that will be appreciated by Olympic Village fans, Watson also disclosed that ten of the teams are staying in the same place in North London.

"We are still very much touch and go if we will break even," he said.

"We need an average [attendance] of 250 each game."

Betting company Paddy Power is sponsoring the competition.

It seems there might have been other partners had the list of competitors been slightly different.

Said Watson: "We got to latter-stage negotiations with four companies, each of which started to gauge gently if we would remove Tibet.

"Once we said 'No', they withdrew their interest."

The importance of the event to Tibetans, and no doubt others taking part, was evident in the pride with which assistant coach Gompo Dorjee reacted to his team's performance after a hard-fought 3-1 defeat at the hands of a bigger and more powerful Northern Cyprus side.

"They played according to what we planned: with more use of grounded balls, not aerial," he explained.

Dorjee also told me about his own experience as an international footballer for Tibet: a 4-1 defeat by Greenland in Copenhagen in 2001.

It was, he said, "the proudest moment of my whole career".

If the motivation of those directly involved in the tournament and their London-based diasporas, large and small, was transparent, that of other 'neutrals' drawn to the little Enfield Town ground by the Great Cambridge Road interested me.

And there were many of them: by the end of the sun-blessed day, club insiders told me that the Enfield Town attendance record of "about 900" for the venue had been eclipsed comfortably.

Some neutrals had the air of dyed-in-the-wool, mainly lower-league, football enthusiasts.

Amid a colourful sprinkling of replica shirts on display, I spotted Bristol Rovers, Colchester United, Ipswich Town, Dorchester Town, a flamingo pink Gillingham number and a Michael Essien top in Ghanaian yellow, red and green.

The only Premier League item I can remember was a red and blue Crystal Palace shirt whose wearer was with a Tibet fan in their striking and equally red and blue colours.

I also met Stephanie, who had come all the way from Bonn to watch Tibet motivated, so she said, by cancellation earlier this year of a planned match between Tibet and a small German club side.

"I thought I must support CONIFA," she told me.

"Tibet have all my sympathy."

The owner of a New Zealand scarf that caught my eye turned out to be a London School of Economics student called Holly who was there with a group including Josh, a young man who had visited Abkhazia recently and was wearing the only t-shirt I have ever seen in which Georgian dumplings were a prominent design feature.

"It is more like Cuba than Cuba," he told me.

"It was a little more off the beaten track than we expected." 

It all added up to a cosmopolitan, carnival atmosphere at a lower-league English ground which, as home of a cheery, supporter-owned club, was probably the ideal place to accommodate it.

The afternoon ended with a grinning Tibetan jigging along to Northern Cypriot folk music pounded out indefatigably by a wandering drum-and-zurna duo.

The neutrals, meanwhile, were starting to take an interest in the destiny of the competition.

"Panjab are losing to Western Armenia 1-0," announced one.

This was not, all things considered, a sentence I ever expected to hear at a venue usually associated with the Premier Division of the Bostik League.