10 Wars That Were Started For Stupid Reasons

10. Football (El Salvador Vs. Honduras, 1969)

In the late 1960s, El Salvador and Honduras had a problem with each other. Honduras had land and El Salvador had people, so there were a lot of Salvadorians in Honduras, and Honduras was in the process of enthusiastically evicting those Salvadorians from land they occupied to give it to good, hard-working (ie rich) Hondurans.

While the underlying reasons had been bubbling noxiously away for a while, it took 'the Beautiful Game' to spark full-on bloodshed.

Qualifying for the World Cup called for a series of three football matches between the two nations. In late 1969 these matches happened to the tune of hooligans battering each other with nationalistic fury, causing tensions that could only be sated with a declaration of war.

The evening of the third match, El Salvador dissolved diplomatic ties with its neighbour and invaded a couple of weeks later. The war lasted four days, hence the nickname 'The Hundred Hours War', and a ceasefire was negotiated without anyone really achieving anything.