CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · History & Society

Wales national football team

men's association football team representing Wales

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 24, 2026
Entity authorityQ180857 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Wales national football team (Welsh: Tîm pêl-droed cenedlaethol Cymru) represents Wales in men's international football. It is controlled by the Football Association of Wales (FAW), the governing body for football in Wales. They have been a member of FIFA since 1946 and a member of UEFA since 1954.

Wales have qualified for the FIFA World Cup twice, in 1958 and 2022. In 1958, they reached the quarter-finals before losing to eventual champions Brazil. They then went 58 years before reaching their second major tournament, when – following a rise of 109 places from an all-time low of 117th to a peak of 8th in the FIFA World Ranking between August 2011 and October 2015 – they qualified for UEFA Euro 2016, where they reached the semi-finals before again losing to the eventual champions, Portugal. A second successive UEFA European Championship followed when Wales reached the round of 16 of UEFA Euro 2020. They also progressed through UEFA Euro 1976 qualifying to the quarter-finals, though this was played on a two-legged, home-and-away basis and is not considered part of the finals tournament.

Historically, the Welsh team has featured a number of players from Wales' top club teams, particularly Swansea City and Cardiff City. These two Welsh clubs play in the English league system alongside fellow Welsh clubs Wrexham, Newport County and Merthyr Town.

Editorial summary

“Wales national football team” enters the record as men's association football team representing Wales. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wales, national and football can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1946, 1954, 1958, 2022—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Wales, national and football.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Wales national football team” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Wales, national and football provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q180857. VIAF identifies the subject as 4935148209334000460004. The Library of Congress control number is no2016154608. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1954, 1958 and 2022.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Wales national football team”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Wales national football team primary sources, Wales national football team archive and Wales research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Wales national football team”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Wales national football team” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.