The history of international football

The first official international match came before every home nation had a settled national association. Scotland's 1872 team was made up of Queen's Park players, and the Scottish FA followed in 1873. Within a generation, regular international fixtures between the British nations became part of the football calendar.

The international game's bigger steps came in the twentieth century — the founding of FIFA in 1904, the first World Cup in 1930, and the formation of the regional continental confederations across the following decades. Each step expanded the international game from a few British fixtures to a global international structure.

On 30 November 1872, Scotland and England met at Hamilton Crescent in Glasgow in the first official international match. The result was a goalless draw, played in front of around four thousand spectators. The match had been arranged between the English Football Association and the football clubs of Glasgow, and Scotland's team was made up of players from Queen's Park, the leading Scottish club of the day.

That fixture was the start of a tradition. England and Scotland made the fixture an annual part of the football calendar, with later interruptions during wartime and changing competition schedules. Within a few years Wales and Ireland joined to form the British Home Championship — the first international competition. The tournament ran in some form until 1984 and was the testing ground for many of the conventions of international football, including the idea of a fixed national team selected by a national association.

By the turn of the twentieth century, more countries had national football associations and wanted to play international football against each other. Without a single body to organise these matches, fixtures had to be arranged one at a time between national associations, with no shared rules on player eligibility or match format.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association — FIFA — was founded in Paris on 21 May 1904. Its founding members were Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland; the British associations did not join initially and went on to leave and rejoin FIFA more than once in the years that followed. From the start, FIFA's role was to organise international football and support competition between national associations. Spain was represented at the founding by Madrid Football Club, before the Spanish national federation existed. The Laws of the Game remained the responsibility of IFAB, with FIFA joining that process in 1913.

The 1930 World Cup was held in Uruguay during the centenary of Uruguayan independence. Thirteen teams took part — seven from South America, four from Europe and two from North America — and Uruguay beat Argentina 4-2 in the final. The tournament was a knockout from the second round onwards, with a small group stage that often had only three teams per group.

The next two tournaments, in 1934 and 1938, were straight knockouts and were both won by Italy. The Second World War interrupted the World Cup for twelve years; when it returned in 1950, the tournament was held in Brazil and ended in the famous Maracanazo, with Uruguay beating the hosts in the deciding match of a final-round group. From 1954 onwards, the familiar format of group stage followed by knockout rounds settled into place, and the World Cup grew in scale at almost every tournament that followed.

As football spread, regional bodies appeared to organise competitions within each continent. CONMEBOL, the South American confederation, was the first, founded in 1916. UEFA followed in 1954, then AFC in Asia, CAF in Africa, CONCACAF in North and Central America and the Caribbean, and OFC in Oceania. Each confederation runs its own continental national-team tournament and its own club competitions.

The confederations also play a major role in World Cup qualifying. FIFA allocates a number of World Cup places to each confederation, and each confederation runs its own qualifying campaign to fill those places. This is why World Cup qualifying takes different forms in different parts of the world — a long round-robin league in South America, group stages in Europe, multi-round knockouts elsewhere.

The World Cup expanded from 13 teams to 16, then 24, then 32, then 48 — covering more confederations at every step. Continental tournaments, including the European Championship, the Copa América, the Africa Cup of Nations, the AFC Asian Cup, the CONCACAF Gold Cup and the OFC Nations Cup, all developed alongside it, with their own qualifying paths.

Women's international football took longer to establish itself. The FIFA Women's World Cup was first held in 1991, and continental women's tournaments developed across the same period. Women's international football has its own World Cup, continental tournaments and qualifying campaigns, with formats that broadly mirror the men's game.