“Was looking at the article on Pico Lopes, and then looked at the Cape Verde Afcon squad,” tweets Johntheblog. “Twenty-three players, whose clubs are in 16 different countries. What’s the most amount of different (club) countries represented in a 23-player squad for an international tournament?”
“Thanks to a long journey and an obsession with both flags and little explored international leagues, I determined the following which I hope is accurate (it was quite a bumpy train ride),” writes Robbie Dale, who straps on his oxygen tank and takes a deep dive on our behalf. “If we’re just looking at 23-man squads (and I did only look at the men’s game), we can discount the most recent tournaments, which would otherwise top the board on pure ‘squad club diversity’, including the current Afcon itself. Indeed, the Cape Verde squad mentioned have 24 players listed from 16 different clubs. It is possible to name up to 27 this year, and 23-plus is now of course common-place, post-Covid. That said, I looked over every squad I could easily find details for (about 98% of them, I’d guess) for every edition of each continental competition, plus the World Cup since each of their inceptions.
