The New Zealand national football team, nicknamed the All Whites, is the national association football team of New Zealand and is governed by New Zealand Football (NZF). The team plays in an all-white strip rather than the traditional New Zealand sporting black due to a former FIFA regulation that reserved black for the international referee strip. Its nickname is also a play on the New Zealand national rugby union team, known as the All Blacks. The silver fern, a symbol of New Zealand, appears on the All Whites uniform.
New Zealand played in the 1982 FIFA World Cup and in the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Though they exited the competition after the first round in both occasions, in 2010 they eventually turned out to be the only team not to lose a game during that World Cup. The tournament also featured one of New Zealand's most notable results, a 1-all draw with the then-champion Italy.
Because most New Zealand football clubs are semi-professional rather than fully professional, most top New Zealand footballers play abroad for clubs in Europe, in the United States, or in the Australian A-League.
New Zealand formerly battled Australia for top honours in the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). However, Australia now plays in the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), leaving New Zealand as the only seeded team in the OFC. New Zealand has won the OFC Nations Cup four times – in 1973, 1998, 2002 and 2008.
Read more about New Zealand National Football Team: Early History, Development, Overall Record, Results and Fixtures, Supporters, Kit
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“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)
“Teasing is universal. Anthropologists have found the same fundamental patterns of teasing among New Zealand aborigine children and inner-city kids on the playgrounds of Philadelphia.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“The national anthem belongs to the eighteenth century. In it you find us ordering God about to do our political dirty work.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle,
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.””
—Clement Clarke Moore (1779–1863)