Russia

Igor Akinfeev spent his whole career guarding a goal that, on paper, belongs to a team younger than he was when he first pulled on the shirt. Russia's national side did not exist when the players who built its reputation were learning the game — it was assembled in 1992, after the Soviet Union broke apart and the Russian Football Union inherited the old federation's place at FIFA, a seat Russia had held in one form or another since 1912. The first match under the new name came that August, a 2–0 win over Mexico in Moscow, played at the ground the team still calls home.

The Luzhniki holds roughly 81,000, and the shirts carry a detail few visiting sides bother to notice: the pattern on the red home kit is drawn from the sound wave of the national anthem's opening chord, and the words "Russia – our sacred state" are stitched inside the collar.

What complicates any claim to glory is the question of which team gets credit for it. As the Soviet Union, the side won the European Championship in 1960 and finished fourth at the 1966 World Cup in England. As the Russian Federation, the closest it has come is the semi-finals of Euro 2008 and the quarter-finals of a World Cup it hosted itself in 2018, a run that turned Akinfeev, by then the long-serving captain, into the face of a tournament played on his own ground.

The rivalries carry weight beyond the scoreline — with Ukraine and Georgia, shaped as much by politics as by football, and with Finland, an older and plainer sporting grudge. Long before any of that, in January 1992, a transitional side wearing the name Commonwealth of Independent States played its own short, separate existence — a few months and a handful of matches before the Russian team took the field on its own.