Northern Ireland at the FIFA World Cup Northern Ireland at the FIFA World Cup The Northern Ireland national football team have appeared in the finals of the FIFA World Cup on three occasions. Their best World Cup performance was in their first appearance in the finals, the 1958 World Cup, where they reached the quarter-finals after beating Czechoslovakia 2–1 in the play-off. They were knocked out by France, losing 4–0. In the 1958 competition Northern Ireland became the least populous country to have qualified for the World Cup, a record that stood until Trinidad & Tobago qualified for the 2006 World Cup. Northern Ireland remains, however, the
FIFA Women's World Cup venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about one month. The seven FIFA Women's World Cup tournaments have been won by 4 national teams. The current champion is the United States, after winning their third title in the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup. In 1971 an unofficial tournament was held in Mexico. In 1988 – 58 years after the first Men's FIFA World Cup tournament in 1930 and approximately 17 years after the FA ban on women's football was eliminated in 1971 – FIFA hosted an invitational in China as a test to see if a global women's