International football

A national team is made up of players eligible to represent a country, usually through birth, descent or citizenship. FIFA's eligibility rules set out which country a player can represent and limit how often they can switch — once a player has played a competitive senior international for one nation, they can only change country in narrow circumstances.

International football is organised under FIFA, the global governing body, through six confederations covering the regions of the world. UEFA covers Europe, CONMEBOL South America, CAF Africa, AFC Asia, CONCACAF North and Central America, and OFC Oceania. Each confederation runs its own continental tournament for national teams. FIFA itself runs the World Cup, which sits at the top of the international game and is open to teams from every confederation.

At the centre of the cycle is the World Cup. The major continental tournaments — the Euros, Copa América, AFCON, Asian Cup, Gold Cup and OFC Men's Nations Cup — are each played in their own tournament windows, scheduled around domestic seasons and international breaks where possible. League-style tournaments such as the UEFA Nations League fit into the windows around them.

Between tournaments, national teams play in international windows — short blocks of dates set by FIFA, when clubs must release their players for national duty. From 2026, the men's international calendar uses windows in March, June, late September or early October, and November. Most of these windows are used for qualifying — the multi-year campaigns that decide which teams reach the next major tournament. Friendlies and the Nations League fill the windows where qualifying is not in session.

The first official international match was played in 1872 between Scotland and England. National associations were founded across Europe and South America over the following decades, and FIFA was set up in 1904 to organise football at world level. Copa América, first held in 1916, became the first continental tournament; the World Cup followed in 1930, hosted and won by Uruguay.

The other continental tournaments came later. The AFC Asian Cup started in 1956, the Africa Cup of Nations in 1957, the European Championship in 1960, the CONCACAF Championship began in 1963 and was succeeded by the Gold Cup in 1991, and the OFC Men's Nations Cup was first held in 1973. The UEFA Nations League, launched in 2018, is the newest major international competition and was designed to give competitive meaning to fixtures that would otherwise have been friendlies.