Which Men’s Football Teams Are Olympic-Bound? (Plus: Irrelevant Bonus! Sepp Blatter’s Phone Number!)

April 16th, 2008 | by: Laurie |

While I was searching out info for this post, I stumbled on a 56-page document with all of the FIFA regulations for Olympic soccer. Because I know you were dying to know that:

“Each association taking part in the final competition(s) shall ensure, as a condition of its participation, that every player, offi cial or other member of its delegation completes the offi cial entry form provided by FIFA.”

Although I found it interesting that it does give us Sepp Blatter’s phone number. +41-(0)43-222 7777. Just FYI. (Okay, technically it’s FIFA’s phone number. But Sepp’s name is right there above it.)

You must promise me to use this power only for good.

But back to the topic of this post, which is: Which men’s football teams will we be seeing at the Olympics in Beijing this summer?

As we’ve discussed previously, the Olympics, at least on the men’s side, are not just a smaller World Cup. They’re played by each country’s U-23 team, plus three wild card players, so the teams you’ll be seeing will be quite different from the full national teams. Because of this, the teams who have made it through qualifying are not necessarily the ones you’d see at the World Cup. In particular, three of the four World Cup semifinalists from WC’06 — France, Germany and Portugal — are not going to China. So there are definitely some surprises.

So who will we be seeing?

First, the host nation automatically qualifies, so we have:

China

Then we have three other Asian teams:

Australia
Japan
Republic of Korea

Add to that one from Oceania (and remember that Australia switched from Oceania to Asia in 2005):

New Zealand

Then we have our three African teams:

Cameroon
Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
Nigeria

And our four European teams:

Belgium
Italy
Netherlands
Serbia

Our two CONCACAF teams: