World Cup flags on your wheelchair. Use spoke guards to show your support.

Finally the 2018 World Cup is finished and we can all look back on the last four weeks and remember a lot more than football. The stadia have been full of noise and banners, national colours and the nations’ World Cup flags. We all know the Cross of St George for England and perhaps the Southern Cross of Australia or the Bundesflagge of Germany,  but how many more of the World Cup flags do we know.

For example, one of this year’s World Cup flags from Brazil flag with its vibrant yellow, blue and green is called ‘A Auriverde’, translated to The ‘Yellow and Green One’, . The Cross of St George has already beaten El Tricolor Nacional (The National Tricolour) of Columbia and the yellow Nordic cross of Sweden. Unfortunately the Cross of St George lost to the Trobojnica of Croatia in the semi final, with the Tricoloure of France overcoming the Tricolour of Belgium in the other semi-final and eventually going on to win the World Cup itself.

All flags have a story, for example, South Korea’s flag, the Taegukgi, was only officially proposed by the government in the late 19^th century, after seven years of treaty talks with China, Japan and the USA. The flag has three parts, a white rectangular background, a red and blue circle in the middle and four black trigrams, one towards each corner. The symbolism is dramatic: the circle in the middle is derived from the philosophy of um-yang (yin-yang from China) and represents balance in the universe. Each trigram (geon, ri, gam and gon) represents one of the four classical elements of heaven, fire, water and earth.

Interestingly, only one country does not have a rectangular flag, and is ranked 161 (out of a total of 206 countries) in the World FIFA men’s rankings to June 2018. The flag is a combination of two red pennons (pennants) with the large blue border around the unique shape of two overlapping right angle triangles: the smaller upper triangle bears the white stylised moon (the rising sun on the horizontal crescent moon) and the larger lower triangle displays the white twelve pointed sun. The flag belongs to the country of Nepal, perhaps soon this will be one of the World Cup flags.

The 2018 World Cup has been a truly entertaining and colourful event. Let’s hope for a similar story when the World Cup is held under the   auspices of the Al-Adaam flag in Qatar in 2022 with more new World Cup flags to be seen.

If you have a favourite of the World Cup flags or any other flag, please give us a call on 07 584 207 019 to discuss.

Sources:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-your-countrys-flag

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flag_names

https://www.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/ranking-table/men/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Nepal