Every national team in the dataset

All 184 national sides the players game recognises, with how many players each accounts for — and why footballing nationality is not the same thing as citizenship.

Nationality is the field this game is queried about more than any other, almost always for the same reason: the answer looked wrong, and the player in question holds a passport for somewhere else. This page is the full enumeration, so you can see exactly which sides exist in the data and how large each one is.

What "nationality" means here

It means the national team a player represents. Not their citizenship, and not their place of birth. The three coincide most of the time and diverge often enough to matter — dual nationals, players who qualify through a grandparent, players born abroad to expatriate parents — and a game built on citizenship would reject correct answers constantly.

Working that out is not a single field lookup. The strongest available evidence is used first: an explicit record of who a player represents in sport, then the senior national side they were actually capped by, then a youth or B side, then the home nation implied by birthplace, and only then citizenship — and citizenship only where it is unambiguous. Where nothing settles it, the field is left blank rather than guessed. 477 players in the set have no nationality for that reason, and they remain perfectly valid answers to club, league and position cells.

Two consequences are worth spelling out. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are separate national sides, and "United Kingdom" is not one — a player recorded only as British has to be resolved to a home nation or left blank. And representative sides that are real but not FIFA members, Catalonia and the Basque Country among them, are not nationalities here at all; those players appear under the FIFA side they are eligible for. The rest of the method is here.

By confederation

The confederation groupings below are what the "African nation", "CONMEBOL nation" and similar categories draw on, so a side missing from a confederation list cannot appear in those cells even though it can appear in its own.

UEFA — Europe

37 sides, 24,885 players.

CONMEBOL — South America

10 sides, 2,674 players.

CONCACAF — North and Central America and the Caribbean

10 sides, 624 players.

CAF — Africa

20 sides, 2,437 players.

AFC — Asia and Australia

9 sides, 475 players.

Everywhere else

98 further sides appear in the dataset without a confederation grouping. They are valid answers to their own nationality categories where those exist, but they are not reachable through a confederation cell.