Capped by two countries

A senior cap normally ties a player to one country for the rest of his career. Even so, 210 men in Goaler's football data are recorded with senior caps for more than one national team. Goaler's own check against English Wikipedia removes one of them, Stan Mortensen, whose Wales cap it treats as a wartime international, which leaves 209. They fall into two groups that have little in common: 122 played on while their country split, merged or was renamed around them, and 87 played for teams of two different countries.

When the country changed

Goaler's data keeps the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Serbia and Montenegro, East Germany and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as historic teams, apart from the countries that followed them. The 122 players in the first group have caps for one of those states and for a successor, or for two states of the same line:

• Yugoslav teams: 52 players, among them 15 capped by Yugoslavia and Croatia, and 13 by Serbia and Montenegro and Serbia.
• Soviet teams: 38, among them 14 who played for the Soviet Union, the CIS and Russia, and 11 for the Soviet Union and Ukraine.
• Czechoslovakia: 24, of whom 17 were also capped by the Czech Republic and 7 by Slovakia.
• East Germany: 7, all also capped by Germany.
• The Netherlands Antilles: one player, also capped by Curaçao.

Eight of the 122 never played for a current team at all: seven have caps for Yugoslavia and for Serbia and Montenegro, and one for the Soviet Union and the CIS. Some of these records give both teams the same years, such as Dragan Stojković's 1983 to 2001 for each, a sign that one team is filed under two names.

In Goaler's Tic-Tac-Toe, none of this makes a player a two-country answer. Historic states are never headers, and a cap for a former state never counts for its successor: a Czechoslovakia cap is not a Czech Republic cap. For 13 of the 122, the check against Wikipedia found caps for the former state only, so the game accepts the link to the successor but never counts it towards a cell's minimum.

Two waves of switches

The other 87 changed association. Ten of their records have a problem, described below, and five players were first capped by both teams in the same year, so only 72 show clearly which team came first. Their second teams cluster in two periods: 37 first played for their second team before 1966, and 31 in 2000 or later. Only four switched in between.

The early wave runs mostly towards Italy. In Goaler's data, sixteen players went from Argentina, Uruguay or Brazil to Italy, nine of them from Argentina, and 15 of the 16 won their first Italy cap before 1966. The exception is Thiago Motta, capped by Brazil in 2003 and by Italy from 2011. Spain took six more before 1966, Ferenc Puskás from Hungary and Alfredo Di Stéfano, who had also played unofficially for Colombia, among them. Five players have caps for both Austria and Germany; their German caps, all dated between 1938 and 1942, came after Austria's annexation in 1938, for a German team that Goaler's data merges with the modern one. Kim Yong-sik went from Japan to South Korea: Korea was under Japanese rule until 1945.

The modern wave looks different. Of the 31 who switched in 2000 or later, 21 have recorded years for their first team that fall within a single calendar year. Nine moved from a European team to an African one: Spain to Morocco or Ghana, England to Ivory Coast or Sierra Leone, France to Cameroon or the Central African Republic, and Belgium to Morocco or Ghana. Declan Rice went from the Republic of Ireland to England, Diego Costa from Brazil to Spain. Eight of the 87 played for two current teams that came out of the same former state: four for Ukraine and Russia, each with Ukraine caps dated 1992, and four between Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia.

Records to read with care

The ten problem records are left out of the table and of the two waves. László Kubala's data has a second Spain spell from 1969, when he was 42, and a Paraguay spell in 1995, at 68; Edu Coimbra's Japan spell starts in 2002, at 55. Both look like coaching jobs recorded as playing spells, a known kind of error: Goaler's list of excluded players already holds two managers whose only club spell was a managing job. Kubala's playing caps for Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Spain are genuine; only the later spells are suspect, which is why he is not in the table. Goaler's check against Wikipedia does not count Kubala's Paraguay link as a cap, and could not confirm Edu's Japan link, Taulant Xhaka's Swiss caps or Carlos Peña's Argentine ones.

Tim Cahill's Samoa spell is dated 1994, when he was 15 by his birth year; his Samoa games were for the under-20 side. Jocelyn Angloma's Guadeloupe spell starts when he was 41, which is right: he played for Guadeloupe, not a FIFA member, at the 2007 Gold Cup. Ardian Kozniku's Kosovo spell is dated 1993, but Kosovo joined FIFA in 2016, so a 1993 game is unofficial. Three spells carry no start year: Gabriel Calderón's for Bahrain, Nikola Jurčević's for Azerbaijan and Alberto Spencer's for Uruguay. The years elsewhere in the table are as Wikidata records them and could be incomplete.

Puskás also appears among the top international scorers, counted under Hungary. On a Tic-Tac-Toe board, no cell pairs two nations, so a player like Rice can only use his two countries in two different cells, each crossed with a club; how many players some of those club and country pairs have is counted in the rarest Easy cells.