Denmark

Denmark had no team to send until the Olympic football tournament in London needed one, and on 19 October 1908 that scratch side beat France's reserve team 9–0. The Danish Football Association had existed since 1889, but that afternoon is the one the national team counts as its start, and the silver medal that followed in the same tournament set a pattern that would repeat in 1912 and again in 1960, with a bronze added in 1948.

The step came instead at a tournament Denmark had not qualified for. In 1992 Yugoslavia was expelled from the European Championship over the war in the Balkans, and Denmark, runners-up in its qualifying group, took the vacant place with barely two weeks' notice. Some players had already booked their summer holidays. The team went on to beat Germany 2–0 in the final in Gothenburg, and the run is still spoken of as the Euro 92 miracle. It gave Denmark its only European title, and three years later a Confederations Cup was won by beating Argentina.

Both results sat on the back of a side already known as Danish Dynamite, the attacking team built under Sepp Piontek through the 1980s that reached the semi-finals of Euro 1984 with players such as Preben Elkjær and Michael Laudrup. Laudrup would go on to win 104 caps; Christian Eriksen has since taken the appearance record past that mark, and Peter Schmeichel was named the world's best goalkeeper in the early 1990s while marshalling the same defence that shut out Germany in Gothenburg.

Home matches are played in front of just over 38,000 at Parken in Copenhagen, in the red shirts that gave the team its older nickname, De Rød-Hvide. The Nordic derby against Sweden and Norway carries its own weight, and Germany has never quite lost its edge as an opponent since 1992. A second major trophy, though, is still the one thing that has not followed the first.