FIFA has a useful shorthand to speed up its organisation of every recognised football federation in the world.
World Cup 2026 will feature 48 of them but there are 211 FIFA member nations in all and each one of those – and several non-members too – has a three-letter country code to serve as an abbreviated form of its name across the football industry.
The three-letter designation is also applied to match officials from each federation, so they serve as very neat labels for a range of purposes, and these are the 48 FIFA country codes we'll be seeing in television score bugs in June and July.
Every FIFA country code at World Cup 2026
FIFA country codes are used in all official materials for every FIFA competition and those of its six continental confederations around the world. They're also deployed for the purposes of standardised identification of federations in the media.
Some FIFA country codes are easy to guess but many are a little trickier. Some stem from the local language, others anglicised, others still rooted in French.
England are ENG and Scotland are SCO, so there are issues with the home nations or indeed the host countries. United States (USA), Canada (CAN) and Mexico (MEX) all speak for themselves.
Some of the remaining 43 teams have some FIFA country code idiosyncrasies worth looking out for in the top corner of your television screen this summer.
Austria have the AUT code because each one has to be unique and AUS is used for Australia. They'll both be in action at World Cup 2026 along with Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose FIFA country code is BIH – Bosne i Hercegovine.
Curacao's country code is CUW as a labyrinthine consequence of its inheritance of Netherlands Antilles' FIFA membership and the highly technical international standard open which most FIFA country codes are based.
DR Congo are COD despite the local French suggesting RDC would be the obvious alternative to the English initials DRC, while French has been applied for Morocco/Maroc, who play as MAR, and Ivory Coast or Cote d'Ivoire (officially), who are CIV.
It's somewhat fortunate that there is no IRA code: World Cup 2026 participants Iran and Iraq are distinguished as IRN and IRQ, respectively. Some nations, including Japan (JPN) and New Zealand (NZL) are stripped of letters in a more practically useful manner, while others are simply localised.
South Korea are KOR, and there are two nations in particular that have a high degree of formality in their country codes: the Republic of South Africa (RSA) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
