Random FIFA Team Generator

Press generate and you get one to five national football teams picked at random from a list of 70 countries that have played at a FIFA World Cup. Each card shows the flag, the country, its best World Cup result and a short line of its most famous players. It is built for people who want a team assigned to them, whether that is for a FIFA or EA Sports FC match with friends, a sweepstake, a quiz round or a "support a random country this tournament" challenge.

What you can set

The only control is the number of teams, from 1 to 5. Each press shuffles the whole list and deals off the top, so a batch never contains the same country twice, which matters when you are assigning teams to a group of players. There is no confederation filter (UEFA, CONMEBOL, CAF and so on) and no strength tier, so a group of five can easily be Brazil, Togo, Iceland, Bahrain and Italy. If you want fairness, generate once per player in turn rather than one batch, and reroll anyone who lands a heavy favorite.

What each card shows

Four things. The flag comes from the same SVG set used by our flag generator. The team name is the country. The accomplishments line is the country's best World Cup finish and the years it happened, written the way fans say it: "Champions (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, 2002)" for Brazil, "Runners-up (1974, 1978, 2010)" for the Netherlands, "Quarterfinals (1970, 1986)" for Mexico, "Round of 16 (2002, 2010, 2018, 2022)" for Japan. Seventeen of the seventy teams have never made it past the group stage, and their card says exactly that. The great players line is three to six names spanning eras, for example Pelé, Romário, Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Neymar for Brazil, or Lev Yashin, Andrei Arshavin and Roman Pavlyuchenko for Russia. These are national teams only; there are no clubs, no squad ratings and no current line-ups.

Ways people use it

• Picking sides in FIFA or EA FC. Random national teams stop everyone choosing France every match. Generate two, and whoever gets the weaker side gets to pick the stadium.
• World Cup sweepstakes. Draw one team per person for an office or family pool. Because a batch has no repeats, a group of five can be dealt in one press.
• Trivia rounds. Hide the country and read out the accomplishments and players; the table has enough spread that "Fourth place (1966)" with Lev Yashin is a fair question and "Champions" with Franz Beckenbauer is an easy one.
• Adopting a second team. Fans whose country did not qualify roll a team to follow for the tournament and read up on its history from the card.
• Career-mode and manager challenges. Some players use the pick as a rule: take whichever nation comes up and try to win a tournament with it.

Which countries are in the pool

All eight nations that have won the World Cup are here: Brazil, Germany, Italy, Argentina, France, Uruguay, England and Spain. So are the regular finalists and semifinalists such as the Netherlands, Croatia, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic. The rest of the list is made up of nations that have qualified at least once, from long-standing qualifiers like Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Morocco, Nigeria and the USA to one-time or occasional appearances like Iceland, Jamaica, Togo, Angola, Trinidad and Tobago, Iraq, Israel, Slovenia and Qatar. A few Asian entries, such as Bahrain and Uzbekistan, have not played a World Cup finals and are listed with their Asian Cup record instead.

Historical teams are folded into their modern successors: the Soviet Union's record sits under Russia and Yugoslavia's under Serbia, which is how FIFA itself assigns those results. That means the list has 70 distinct countries with no double entries.

If you want players rather than teams, the Random Soccer Player Generator picks individuals. For other leagues the Random NHL Team Generator does the same job for hockey, and the Random Sport Generator picks the sport itself. See all sports generators for the full set.