In 1872, the first international football match took place between England and Scotland.

Since then, international football has been at the apex of world sport.

And starting in 1930, a quadrenial competition has been held where the greatest national teams

competed to determine the world champion.

Learn more about the FIFA World Cup, its history, and the controversy surrounding

it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Before I begin, for the purpose of this episode, I will be referring to the sport in question as

football aka Association football as I'm not talking about any other sports

there will be no confusion so to everyone in the United States and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and Japan and Papa New Guinea and Fiji.

Just pretend that you'll be traveling in Europe for the next few minutes.

That being said, in a previous episode I talked about the origins of Association football

and how it originally developed

with small clubs and schools. That's how it developed the name Association

Football. As the sport grew in popularity in the 19th century, it wasn't long

until National All-Star teams were created to compete against other national teams.

The first recognized international match between two national teams took place on November 30, 1872 in Glasgow, between England and Scotland. The match had 4,000 fans in attendance

and the final score was 0 to 0, which somehow seemed really appropriate. I should note that many people around the world

often wonder why the United Kingdom doesn't have a national team. Rather their

country gets split up into four teams representing England, Scotland, Northern Ireland

and Wales.

On one hand it seems to be kind of unfair that one country gets to field four teams, but on the

other hand it also means that they are at a disadvantage in that they have to field four

teams. It has everything to do with history.

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