Antigua and Barbuda

On match nights the Antigua Recreation Ground belongs to the national side.

The Antigua and Barbuda Football Association had already existed for over four decades by the time the team played its first sanctioned international, a 1972 CONCACAF Championship qualifier against Trinidad and Tobago that ended 11–1.

Trinidad and Tobago has stayed the measuring stick. Sixteen years after that opening loss, Antigua and Barbuda met them again in the final of the 1988 CFU Championship and came away with the closest thing to silverware the team has produced: runners-up. Nothing since, in the Caribbean Cup or the CONCACAF Nations League, has matched it, though semi-final runs in 2012 and 2014 kept the side relevant in a region Trinidad has generally dominated.

The nickname on the shirts today, the Benna Boys, only dates to 2012, when supporters chose it in a public vote over the older, unofficial Wadadli Boys. Benna is the calypso-adjacent music that came out of the islands' plantations and street life, and putting it on the team gave St. John's a name for the side that had nothing to do with the sport itself.

Peter Byers carries the record books alone: nobody has scored more or played more for the country, a career built partly in leagues in the United States and Canada before he came back to be the reference point for everyone who followed. Dexter Blackstock took the opposite route, going from the same small pool of players into England's Championship with Southampton and Queens Park Rangers.

The team's highest FIFA ranking, 70th, came in October 2014, under the Polish coach Piotr Nowak — a peak reached decades after that first, lopsided match against Trinidad and Tobago set the terms for everything that followed.