ASSUMING ÅGE Hareide's selection is consistent, Norway will take to the field against Scotland at Hampden Park on Saturday with a World Cup winner in their ranks. Tom Hogli might, admittedly, never have played in the FIFA version of the tournament, but his medal is in football and, despite now playing as a right-back, he can also boast of having been joint top-scorer when he helped Sapmi win the Viva World Cup in 2006.

The tournament, as detailed in Steve Menary's excellent book, Outcasts! The Lands That FIFA Forgot, is for members of the New Federation Board, an umbrella organisation that looks after those nations who are not recognised as sovereign states and so are prohibited from joining FIFA. That includes entities such as Tibet and Northern Cyprus, who have well-defined claims for independence, but also ethnic or language groupings, such as Occitania – for the people of France, Spain and Italy who speak the ancient Romance language Occitan – and Sapmi, the side representing the Sami, the Nordic people of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia commonly known as Laps.

The Sami number 70,000, and only took up football formally in 1978, when the annual Sami Cup was inaugurated. Before then, their main sports were reindeer-herding and lasso-throwing. The competition's principal aim is less sport than to bring the Sami together, but they have achieved notable success in football and have played a significant part in the NFB.

Few international organisations are short on internal politicking but, given the widely differing statuses of its members, the NFB seems to suffer more than most, as was all too evident in the build-up to that inaugural World Cup in 2006.

After a deal of internal wrangling which saw Northern Cyprus break away to set up a rival competition, the ELF Cup, which paid expenses to its entrants, the NFB scaled down their inaugural Viva World Cup in Hyères les Palmiers, near Toulon, from 16 teams to four. Visa problems then derailed the Southern Cameroons, leaving the Viva World Cup to be contested by just three sides. Sapmi, with three Norway Under-21 internationals, including Hogli, and Erick Sandvarn, voted the best defender in the Finnish league that season, were overwhelming favourites. Hogli, operating in central midfield, scored twice as hosts Occitania were beaten 7-0 in their opening game, and added another one as Monaco were thrashed 14-0.

That, presumably, gave them a psychological edge for the final, also against Monaco, who had beaten Occitania 3-2 in the other game. As Northern Cyprus beat Crimea 3-1 in the final of the rival competition, Sapmi romped to a 21-1 success, with Hagli hitting a hat-trick. Leif Isak Nilut, the head of the Sapmi Football Federation, responded by spontaneously breaking into a yoik, a Sami folk song. Quite what would have happened had the Sapmi been able to field their most noted player, Blackburn's Morten Gamst Pedersen, doesn't bear thinking about. Nilut insists he will play for Sapmi after he has retired from the Norway national team.

Hogli, having begun his career with Bodo-Glimt, moved on to Tromso after the tournament, and decided not to play in the 2008 version of the cup, which was hosted by Sapmi in Sweden. There they finished third of five teams as the title went to Padania, a side put together by the Italian political party Lega Nord to represent the eight northern regions of Italy.

Hogli's career, meanwhile, has gone from strength to strength, particularly after his switch from midfield to right-back. After a series of impressive performances, the 24-year-old was given his international debut by Hareide in August, in the rain-ravaged friendly against the Republic of Ireland. Conditions were difficult, and Norway looked far from secure, but Hogli stood out. "Finally," Hareide said, "we have a right-back."

Encouraging as that may be, Hareide's Norway are still a long way short of matching the achievements of Egil Olsen's national side, which beat Brazil and rose to be ranked second in the world in the mid-1990s. Olsen employed the English long-ball theorist Charles Reep, by then well in his nineties, as a consultant, having been much taken by statistics that showed that a team was more likely to score in a passage of play beginning with the opposition goalkeeper than with their own.

The focus on whacking endless long-balls into the "bakrom" – literally "back-room", Olsen's term for the space behind the opposition back four – may have gone, but Norway are still a direct side, heavily dependent on the physicality of the Aston Villa forward John Carew.

"This will be my last qualifying series," Hareide said. "I hope it lasts until South Africa."

To do so will require a significant improvement from a back four that looked leaky in the 2-2 home draw against Iceland with which Norway began the campaign. Hogli's form speaks of a potentially bright future, but there are fundamental problems, most notably at left-back, where John Arne Riise has suffered a dip in form since moving from Liverpool to Roma. Ambitions are accordingly limited and even a draw at Hampden would probably be enough to have them yoiking in the Arctic Circle.