Iceland

Reykjavík's Laugardalsvöllur held its breath twice in one tournament in June 2016: first when Iceland beat England 2–1 in the Round of 16 at Euro 2016, then again in the quarter-final defeat to France that followed. Neither result changed the record books at home, but together they turned a team most of Europe had never watched into one it suddenly had to.

The Football Association of Iceland, known as KSÍ, was founded in 1947, the same year the team joined FIFA. Its first recognised international had come the previous year, on 17 July 1946, a 3–0 defeat to Denmark. For decades after that, Iceland's football story was one of absence — no World Cup, no European Championship, nothing to set against neighbours Norway and Denmark, against whom the rivalry runs oldest.

What changed was infrastructure, not tactics: a wave of indoor pitches built through the 2000s gave a population of roughly 330,000 something it had never had, a way to train through the winter. Coach Lars Lagerbäck, appointed in 2011, and his eventual co-manager Heimir Hallgrímsson turned that generation into qualifiers. Two years after Euro 2016, Iceland reached the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the smallest nation by population ever to do so, and went out at the group stage behind Argentina, Nigeria and Croatia.

Birkir Bjarnason has earned more caps than anyone else to wear the shirt, 113; Gylfi Sigurðsson remains the side's leading scorer with 28 goals. The honours since have been modest by design — a Baltic Cup in 2022, a shared Greenland Cup in 1980 and 1984 — footnotes next to the summer that still defines the team. That summer began, as so much of Icelandic football does, in front of just over 9,500 seats at Laugardalsvöllur.