CP football, or seven-a-side football, is played by athletes whose motor control has been affected by non-progressive brain injury: cerebral palsy itself, traumatic brain injury, or the after-effects of stroke. The rules are adapted from FIFA's: seven players a side instead of eleven, a smaller pitch, no offside, and a one-handed throw-in for players who cannot reliably manage two. Matches are two thirty-minute halves. Players are classified by impairment level, from C5 (difficulty walking and running, but stable in stance and shooting) through C8 (minimal impairment that still affects play). Teams must field at least one C5 or C6 player at all times, and no more than two C8 players together, so the competition rewards squads that can win across the full range of disability, not just at its edges.

The 2009 Championships ran from 23 October to 1 November. The venues were grouped around Papendal, the Dutch national training center tucked into the wooded ridges between Arnhem and Oosterbeek. Papendal is the spiritual home of high-performance sport in the Netherlands, a place where Olympic-track cyclists, gymnasts, and judoka train year round. For ten days that autumn it belonged to teams from Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, the Netherlands, Ireland, Great Britain, Argentina, and several others. The tournament was a qualifier for the 2011 CPISRA World Championships, the next step on the road to Paralympic competition, so the stakes were both immediate (a place on the podium) and forward-looking (a seat at the next world championship table).

Karimizadeh's thirteen goals topped the chart. Behind him came Brazil's Renato Lima and Wanderson Silva de Oliveira and Russia's Ivan Pothekin, each with eight; Iran's Bahman Ansari with seven; and a clutch of five-goal scorers including Ukraine's Anatolii Shevchyk, the Netherlands' John Swinkels, and Bosnia and Herzegovina's Sefik Smajlovic. Looking down the goalscorer list is its own kind of geography: Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain. CP football is genuinely global, and the talent is genuinely deep. Many of these names would reappear in later world championships and Paralympic squads.

Twelve teams were drawn into four groups of three, played a round robin, and split into upper and lower halves for a second group stage. The top eight then progressed into knockout matches for placings one through eight; the lower group played out positions nine through thirteen. Drawn finals went to two ten-minute periods of extra time, and beyond that to penalty kicks. The whole structure compressed a lot of football into a short window. For athletes whose conditions can mean greater fatigue from the same effort, that schedule was its own challenge. The tournament was not the largest event on the Dutch sporting calendar that year, and the wider media barely noticed. The players knew exactly what they had played, and that has generally been enough.

CPISRA itself, the Cerebral Palsy International Sports and Recreation Association, has since restructured its football arm. The sport is now governed by the International Federation of Cerebral Palsy Football, the IFCPF, which runs the modern World Championships and Paralympic qualification. Papendal is still Papendal: still hosting national training squads, still tucked under the same trees. Arnhem itself is a few minutes east, with its bridges and its Battle of Arnhem memorials. The 2009 tournament left no monument behind, no plaque, no permanent installation. What it left was a results sheet, a list of scorers, and the memory in a particular community of athletes that for ten days in late autumn, in a wooded corner of the Netherlands, their sport was the main event.