With the World Cup semi-finals approaching, BBC Sport has released an A-Z quiz that asks one deceptively tricky question: can you name the best-performing nation at the World Cup for each letter of the alphabet?

On paper it sounds straightforward. In practice, it is anything but. The quiz covers the full 26 letters, and the catch that trips most people up is this — you need to name the country as it was known at the time, not necessarily what it is called today. That rules out relying solely on modern geography and forces you to brush up on football history going back decades.

Why the naming rule matters

Several nations that have featured prominently in World Cup history no longer exist under the same name, or have since split, merged, or been renamed. West Germany, for instance, won three World Cups under that banner before reunification. Czechoslovakia reached two finals. Yugoslavia produced generations of elite players across multiple tournaments. Any quiz that accounts for those names rather than smoothing them into modern equivalents is doing proper historical justice to the competition.

That attention to detail is precisely what makes this particular quiz harder than it first looks. You might immediately land on the obvious answers — Brazil for B, Germany or its historical variants for G, France for F — but the less-common letters are where most quiz scores start to crumble.

What counts as 'best performing'?

The quiz does not specify exactly which metric defines best performance, which is itself an interesting editorial choice. Is it the deepest run in a single tournament? Total wins across all appearances? Number of finals reached? The ambiguity means some answers may feel debatable — always a good sign in a quiz, because it generates the kind of pub-table argument that football thrives on.

For letters with a thin pool of options, the answer is likely the nation that simply went furthest in any given edition of the tournament. For the heavily populated letters — think S, where Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Scotland have all appeared — there is genuine room for discussion about which nation's overall record edges it.

Good timing, given where the tournament stands

The quiz arrives with France already through to the semi-finals after a comfortable win, and Spain's progress still being settled. The wider tournament has drawn considerable attention for its record-breaking nature — late goals, comebacks, and upsets have featured heavily — which gives any historical retrospective quiz a useful hook right now.

It also sits alongside several other World Cup quizzes BBC Sport has published in recent weeks: naming every nation at the 2026 tournament, identifying every host nation across history, and naming every player in England's and Scotland's squads. Together they form a reasonable archive for anyone wanting to test their football knowledge across different dimensions of the game.

How to approach it

A few pointers if you want a decent score without completely guessing:

  • Start with the easy letters — B (Brazil), F (France), G (Germany or West Germany), I (Italy) and A (Argentina) are where you rack up early confidence.
  • Think historically for the awkward letters — letters like C, U, Y and Z require you to cast further back through the tournament's history.
  • Remember the naming rule — modern country names will cost you answers that historical ones would bank.

The quiz is live on the BBC Sport website. Given that the semi-finals are imminent and the football conversation is at its loudest, it is a reasonable way to spend 10 minutes before the next match kicks off.

Frequently asked

Where can I find the BBC World Cup A-Z quiz?
The quiz is available on the BBC Sport website under their Football Quizzes section. You can also sign up for notifications to receive their latest quizzes directly to your device.
Why do I have to use old country names in the World Cup A-Z quiz?
Because many nations that performed well at the World Cup historically no longer exist under the same name — West Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia are key examples. The quiz asks for the name the country used at the time of the tournament, not its current name.
Which letters are hardest in a World Cup A-Z quiz?
Generally the trickier letters are those with fewer qualifying nations — X, Q, and Z tend to have very limited options, while letters like S can be tricky because several strong nations share it and you need to identify which has the best overall World Cup record.