New Zealand national football team

The New Zealand national football team represents New Zealand in international football. The team is controlled by the governing body for football in New Zealand New Zealand Football (NZF), which is currently a member of the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). The team's official nickname is the All Whites, being one of many national team nicknames related to the All Blacks.

New Zealand is a four-time OFC champion. The team represented New Zealand at the FIFA World Cup tournaments in 1982 and 2010, and the FIFA Confederations Cup tournaments in 1999, 2003 and 2009.

Because most New Zealand football clubs are semi-professional rather than fully professional, most top New Zealand footballers play abroad for clubs in Europe, the United States, Canada and in the Australian A-League.

History

Early years

New Zealand's first international football match was played in Dunedin at the old Caledonian Ground on 23 July 1904 against a team representing New South Wales. New Zealand lost by the game's only goal, but drew with the same team 3–3 in a game at Athletic Park, Wellington seven days later. The following year the team played a Wellington representative side on 10 June before embarking on a tour of Australia, during which they played eleven representative sides, including three "test matches" against New South Wales. Of these three matches they won one, lost one, and drew one.

World Cup

World Cup commonly refers to:

World Cup can also refer to:

Athletics

Badminton

Bandy

Baseball and softball

Basketball

Chess

Cricket

Equestrian

Football

American football

Association football

New Zealand

New Zealand (/njuːˈziːlənd/ new-ZEE-lənd, Māori: Aotearoa [aɔˈtɛaɾɔa]) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The country geographically comprises two main landmasses – that of the North Island, or Te Ika-a-Māui, and the South Island, or Te Waipounamu – and numerous smaller islands. New Zealand is situated some 1,500 kilometres (900 mi) east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and roughly 1,000 kilometres (600 mi) south of the Pacific island areas of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. Because of its remoteness, it was one of the last lands to be settled by humans. During its long isolation, New Zealand developed a distinctive biodiversity of animal, fungal and plant life. The country's varied topography and its sharp mountain peaks, such as the Southern Alps, owe much to the tectonic uplift of land and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, while its most populous city is Auckland.

Somewhere between 1250 and 1300 CE, Polynesians settled in the islands that were to become New Zealand, and developed a distinctive Māori culture. In 1642, Abel Tasman, a Dutch explorer, became the first European to sight New Zealand. In 1840, representatives of the British Crown and Māori Chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, making New Zealand a British colony. Today, the majority of New Zealand's population of 4.5 million is of European descent; the indigenous Māori are the largest minority, followed by Asians and Pacific Islanders. Reflecting this, New Zealand's culture is mainly derived from Māori and early British settlers, with recent broadening arising from increased immigration. The official languages are English, Māori and New Zealand Sign Language, with English predominant.

FIFA World

FIFA World was a free-to-play massively multiplayer online football game developed by Electronic Arts. It was announced on 9 August 2013 and later an open beta was released on 12 November 2013 in Brazil and Russia. The open beta was made available globally on 20 May 2014, with support in English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish and Turkish.Italian was included with the release of version 9.0 of the game on 5 November 2014. Players could play the game using their keyboard, a combination of their keyboard and mouse or a game controller.

Like with the main releases of FIFA, Lionel Messi featured on promotional images and the title screen of the game. Arda Turan was announced as an ambassador for the game in Turkey on 27 August 2014, with Eden Hazard announced as another ambassador for the video game on 15 September 2014.

FIFA World, along with other EA free-to-play titles Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free, and Need for Speed: World, went offline on 14 July 2015.

FIFA World Cup

The FIFA World Cup, often simply called the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four years since the inaugural tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 when it was not held because of the Second World War. The current champion is Germany, which won its fourth title at the 2014 tournament in Brazil.

The current format of the competition involves a qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, to determine which teams qualify for the tournament phase, which is often called the World Cup Finals. 32 teams, including the automatically qualifying host nation(s), compete in the tournament phase for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month.

The 20 World Cup tournaments have been won by eight different national teams. Brazil have won five times, and they are the only team to have played in every tournament. The other World Cup winners are Germany and Italy, with four titles each; Argentina and inaugural winners Uruguay, with two titles each; and England, France and Spain, with one title each.