Guinea

Guinea have never made a World Cup, and the Syli National's business these days runs through qualifying campaigns and the Africa Cup of Nations, where the last three editions ended in the quarter-finals — 2015, then again in 2023. Paulo Duarte took over the bench in 2025, the latest in a line of coaches asked to close the gap between reaching that stage and getting past it.

The closest anyone came was Petre Moldoveanu's side in 1976, when Guinea finished the Africa Cup of Nations as runners-up after a group-format final round decided the title rather than a single match — a 1–1 draw in their last game left them a point short of Morocco. Fifty years on, it remains the closest the country has come to a continental trophy on that stage.

Regionally, Guinea found more room to breathe. They won the Amílcar Cabral Cup, the competition for West African national teams, five times between 1981 and 2005, and added a third-place finish at the African Nations Championship in 2020. None of that carries the weight of the Cup of Nations, but it is where the Syli National's honours actually sit.

Issiaga Sylla has captained the side into a record 92 caps, the kind of number built up rather than arrived at. Guinea's fiercest matches, though, are not against continental heavyweights but neighbours — Senegal first, then Mali, fixtures where regional standing matters as much as the result.

The federation behind all of it, the Fédération Guinéenne de Football, was formed in 1959, three years before it joined FIFA and the Confederation of African Football. The team itself had already played once before that, a first international outing against Ghana on 6 December 1958 that ended in a 1–6 defeat — a rough starting point for a side named after the sili, the elephant of Guinean folklore.