Cyprus

Ioannis Okkas earned 106 caps and scored 27 goals for Cyprus, more than anyone else who has worn the shirt, and his career spans the years when the national side stopped losing every close match by habit and started winning a few of them. The federation behind that shirt, the Cyprus Football Association, was formed on 23 September 1934 by eight founding clubs, among them APOEL, Anorthosis Famagusta and AEL Limassol, but the national team traces its own start to 1960, the year Cyprus left British rule. Its first game under FIFA's rules, a 1–1 draw with Israel in Nicosia that November, opened a run of World Cup and European Championship qualifying campaigns that has yet to end in a finals appearance.

The team's first competitive win took eight years to arrive, a 2–1 defeat of Switzerland in February 1968. Since then the record has swung between the historic and the humiliating: a 12–0 defeat to West Germany in 1969 stands as the heaviest loss, while a 5–2 win over the Republic of Ireland in October 2006 and a 2–1 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014 rank among the results locals still bring up unprompted. Against Greece, the fixture carries the weight of shared language and history rather than a settled score; against Turkey, it carries the politics of 1974.

Cyprus play as "The Amber," a name tied to the colour of the home kit, and moved into the AEK Arena – Georgios Karapatakis in Larnaca in late 2021, leaving the GSP Stadium in Nicosia after more than two decades there. In the UEFA Nations League, promotion out of League D in the 2020–21 season lifted them into League C, the clearest sign yet that the side which spent so long absorbing heavy defeats has found a level it can compete at.