Northern Mariana Islands national football team

The Northern Mariana Islands national football team represents the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in international men's football. The team is controlled by the governing body for football in the Northern Mariana Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands Football Association, which is a member of the East Asian Football Federation (EAFF) and since December 2020 a full member of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). The association is not a member of the world governing body FIFA, although it had applied for membership, and so while the national team is eligible to enter AFC and EAFF-run competitions, they are currently ineligible for global competitions such as the FIFA World Cup. As such, they do not have an official FIFA ranking. However, the team have been consistently ranked as one of the worst teams in the world on the Elo ratings and were in fact, in July 2016 rated as the worst men's senior international team in the world in a ratings system that also includes a number of other non-FIFA teams.

Following the completion of the preliminary qualifying round for the 2017 EAFF East Asian Cup the team have won only one official competitive match against international opposition and have a goal difference of −78 in official matches. The team have never qualified for the finals of a major tournament and beyond friendlies and qualifying matches, their only official competition has been in an exhibition tournament in the regional Micronesian Games in 1998, which they won, to date their only tournament success.

They are one of the youngest international teams, having played their first match in an exhibition tournament associated with the 1998 Micronesian Games. Following this appearance, they played only one more match, against the Federated States of Micronesia before the original governing body for football in the country, the Northern Mariana Islands Soccer Federation, became defunct and the team withdrew from international competition. During the time of the Northern Mariana Islands Football Association, eligibility criteria for the national team were quite lax, a minimum residency requirement of two years meant that the national team often included a number of contractors working on Saipan who were not of Northern Marianan heritage. Following the foundation of a new governing body, the Northern Mariana Islands Football Association, the national team was reestablished and, having resigned their associate membership of the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), they joined the EAFF in 2006, becoming full members in 2008.

Since that date, their international appearances have mainly been restricted to qualifying competitions for the EAFF East Asian Cup, although they also attempted to qualify for the AFC Challenge Cup once, having been admitted as associate members in 2009, and have played several friendly matches against neighboring nation Guam, in which the two countries compete for the perpetual trophy, the Marianas Cup. Provided by Wikipedia