Being older than FIFA itself and laying the foundations for the sport you play has its advantages. Among them, the ability to compete with different teams. To understand why England, Wales and Scotland will attend the next European Championship with different national teams, it is enough to understand, first, that the UK is a country made up of four countries. For this reason, his condition cannot be compared, for example, with the Spanish regional teams, which have not yet been recognized by UEFA or FIFA despite the Basque Country’s request at the end of last year.
In the case of the three British teams, to which Northern Ireland should be added, who were unable to qualify, the regional situation is quite different, but it is not the only reason why they can compete independently. After football was invented there, international matches were also invented, with Scotland and England starring in the first national team confrontation in history. That was almost 150 years ago, on November 30, 1872 in Glasgow. Four years later, Team Wales was born, and a decade later, Team Ireland, which competed together at the time, and even 40 years later, the Northern Ireland team was divided.
However, it was not until 1904, 32 years after the birth of international football, that When Spain, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland came together to create FIFA. Two years later, Wales, England and Scotland joined the project, and its long history of inter-regional competition made it unimaginable. A joint British team actually competed as such only at the 2012 London Olympics.
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