BRITISH Football Team?

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Jere Longman and Sarah Lyall, A British Soccer Team? What’s That? Say Scots, Welsh and Irish. New York Times, Sept 19, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/sports/soccer/even-for-olympic-soccer-uniting-britain-may-be-tough.html?scp=1&sq=football%20scotland&st=cse

Quote:

"there is no such thing as a British soccer team. Instead * * *  there are instead individual teams representing Britain’s fractious, proud and fiercely competitive constituent nations — namely England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

"Britain has not played men’s soccer in the Olympics in more than half a century, since the 1960 Rome Games, or even tried to qualify since the early 1970s. The British women have never entered a team since the Olympic tournament for women began in 1996.

"While the International Olympic committee recognizes Britain as a combined team in all sports, FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, recognizes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as separate teams. And there lies the heart of the controversy.

Note:
(a) Following right after quotation 1 above, paragraph 3 starts with the sentence: "Nor are the hypersensitive soccer federations in the non-English nations exactly clamoring to have their players compete side by side with players from their bitter rival, England."

The "English" in "non-English nations" refers to not teh language but the nationality; so non-English nations means Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
(b) Regan is an Irish surname, shortened from O'Regan. In fact, Regan and Ryan (one of the most common surnames in Ireland; itself was shortened from O'Ryan) were derived from an identical ancient surname.
(b) The report further says, "Modern soccer began here in 1863."

association football
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_football
(section 3 History)
(c) World Cup's official name is FIFA World Cup, where FIFA stands for Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Zurich, Switzerland).
(d) Members of FIFA, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong are under official names inside FIFA of
China PR,
Chinese Taipei, and  
Hong Kong, respectively.
List of men's national association football teams
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_men%27s_national_association_football_teams
(section 1.1 AFC (East Asia))


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