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The Greece national football team is governed by the Hellenic Football
Federation (HFF) which was founded in 1926 and based in Athens. Although the
country has a long history of playing football, it has never featured that
highly in either the FIFA World Cup or the UEFA European Football Championship,
which is also played one every four years.
Although Greece has been entering the FIFA World Cup since 1934, it did not
qualify for the tournament until the 1994 World Cup hosted in the United States,
where it made it through to Round 1. However, it lost all three of its matches:
0-4 to Argentina, 0-4 to Bulgaria and 0-2 to Nigeria.
Since then the team has failed to qualify for another World Cup, and is
reportedly gearing up for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. However, it fared
much better in the 2004 UEFA European Football Championship. The country shocked
the European football fraternity by making it to the final of the championship
and defeating the heavily touted hosts, Portugal, by a 1-0.
As a result of this stunning achievement, the Greece national football team was
awarded Team of the Year in 2005 by the Laureus World Sports Awards. In
the same year it was also awarded the FIFA Fair Play Award Confederations Cup.
The 5 most capped Greek national players and top 5 goalscorers respectively are
Theodoros Zagorakis, Angelos Basinas, Stratos Apostolakis, Antonios Nikopolidis,
Giorgos Karagounis, Nikos Anastopoulos, Angelos Charisteas, Dimitris Saravakos,
Mimis Papaioannou and Nikos Machlas.
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