Argentina

Buenos Aires does not have one football club at its centre; it has dozens, split by neighbourhood and grievance, and the national team is the rare thing the city agrees to share. On match nights the sky-blue-and-white shirt fills the Estadio Monumental in Núñez, the largest ground in South America at just over 85,000, standing in for River Plate's own colours without belonging to River at all.

The Argentine Football Association was formed in 1893, and the side it runs took its first official fixture against Uruguay in 1901, winning 3-2. What the country actually measures itself by is Diego Maradona in 1986, and Lionel Messi's 2022 final against France, settled on penalties, closing a wait that had outlasted most of the players on the pitch. Messi's number sits apart from the rest of the record book: 125 goals, 207 caps, spread across a career that also delivered the Copa América in 2021 and 2024.

Three World Cups, in 1978, 1986 and 2022, sit alongside three lost finals — 1930, 1990 and 2014 — each of the defeats closer than the scoreline suggested. The Copa América has been won sixteen times, a run stretching from the 1920s through to last year, though Argentina has also lost five finals of it since the 1990s, twice to Chile on penalties within the space of a year.