Eriati Reebo is a man in a hurry. He is the president of the Kiribati Island Football Federation (KIFF), and he wants his country to play a FIFA World Cup qualifier before it disappears underwater.
The worst-case scenario is that Kiribati, an archipelago of 32 atolls and islands in the Pacific, could be submerged by rising sea levels as soon as 2050, while the United Nations has warned it could happen by 2100. The clock is undoubtedly ticking and Reebo is on a mission to make Kiribati FIFA's 212th full member before it is too late.
"Our mission is to join FIFA and play in the Oceania confederation alongside our neighbors Fiji, New Caledonia and American Samoa," Reebo told ESPN in a telephone interview. "We want to play football, but it's also part of raising awareness by using football to show the world that we have a difficult situation, especially on climate change.
"We play soccer, and we want to play at FIFA level, but we have a problem. Our highest point on land is only three meters above the sea level, so every time something happens, like the glacier melting in Nepal, I worry about what will happen here and how soon it will come. We want to join FIFA before the worst happens."
Kiribati (pronounced Kiri-bass), a former British colony that secured its independence in 1979, is located roughly halfway between Hawai'i and Australia. When a Kiribati team consisting solely of local footballers played a friendly game in Fiji on Tuesday, the nation's first match since 2011, it was the latest step toward securing FIFA membership and the chance to become one of the world's many football minnows pursuing the distant dream of qualifying for the World Cup.
With an estimated population close to 140,000 people, it's as remote as you could imagine. The island nation has a 16-team league -- the reigning champions are Betio Town Council -- with games played at the Bairiki National Stadium, a 2,500-capacity ground with a sand pitch, although it has yet to host an international game because Kiribati has never contested a home fixture.
"We have the standard dimension of the field," Reebo said. "But the pitch is sand, not grass or artificial grass. We play on hard sand -- same rules, same format -- but we can build an artificial pitch to move forward with our ambitions."
Kiribati has been an associate member of Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) since 2007 and cannot secure FIFA membership until it is accepted as a full member of OFC, but efforts to take that first significant step are well underway. Other remote islands, including the Marshall Islands, have been unable to reach even associate member status with OFC due to the logistical challenges of traveling between nations for fixtures, but Kiribati has passed that stage and Reebo is confident they will soon be accepted into OFC. That step would ensure greater funding for infrastructure, which could then fuel their push for FIFA membership.
"We are a three-hour flight to Fiji and, from Fiji, it is four hours to Sydney, Australia," Reebo said. "It's not a problem, so there's no doubt that we'll be in the OFC soon and also in FIFA.
"We really feel positive on getting full OFC membership, but for FIFA, we really try to work in all different angles how to tackle and how to achieve it.
"I attended FIFA Congress in Vancouver this year and spoke to Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president. It's good that I had time with him, talking with him face to face. He said, 'So there's an island called Kiribati?'
"We're lucky to have that opportunity. We gave him a local necktie as a gift."
Infantino is seeking reelection next April following the controversy over his failed plan to raise $20 billion with a partial sell-off of a controlling stake in future World Cups and, with each of FIFA's 211 nations having a vote, the 56-year-old has spent recent weeks building support among the game's smaller nations.
Kiribati is unlikely to secure FIFA membership before the presidential election, but Reebo said his association is happy to work with whoever is in charge, be it Infantino or somebody else.
"There's no problem if it's a new president," he said. "We'll just keep going on our way forward to becoming a member of FIFA."
Kiribati has enlisted the help of Matt Webb, a UK-based marketing director who also acts as general secretary of the Marshall Islands Soccer Federation, for help in navigating a path toward FIFA membership. Webb has built a new website for the KIFF and also secured a kit manufacturer to enable Kiribati to cash in on the novelty factor of its status as potentially FIFA's newest member.
"The merchandise plays a huge role in actually getting stuff happening," Webb told ESPN. "Until [Kiribati] are part of FIFA, you haven't got that kind of guaranteed revenue coming in to pay for events and coaching. It's all completely self-generated.
"So if we can create and design kits ourselves and manufacture it, we're going to be making hopefully a little bit more money, which will go towards the football projects."
In order to keep pushing for a chance to play in the 2030 men's World Cup qualifiers, Reebo plans to attend the next FIFA Congress in Rabat, Morocco, in March. Kiribati may have won its race for OFC full membership by that point.
But for now, football politics are taking a back seat to the real challenge of playing a game. Reebo, a police inspector, has arranged for Kiribati to play in a mini tournament in Fiji against local club sides and it will end a 15-year wait for real football action for the team.
"It will be our very first game that's 11-a-side," he said. "We usually play futsal [five vs. five], and have played that in Fiji and Micronesia before, but now we are concentrating on our 11-a-side squad to go to Fiji to play against the Fiji teams.
"Football is the No. 1 sport for us. You are born with it, it is in our DNA. Even though we are an island in the Pacific, we know all of the teams and the stars -- I grew up supporting Barcelona and Arsenal, my idol was the Brazilian Ronaldo. When I went to Vancouver, I was lucky enough to meet another idol, Cafu, so we have the same dreams as everybody else."
But how long can Kiribati wait to achieve its big dream of joining FIFA?
"We will keep trying," Reebo said. "Joining FIFA is about football, but also about making everybody aware of what might happen to Kiribati."