Team GB are a powerhouse at the Olympic Games, regularly racking up huge medal hauls and topping tables in several sports from cycling to swimming.

But there will be no British football players in Paris. Athletes from England, Scotland and Wales regularly compete under the same flag in other events, so why is there no Team GB football team?

Essentially the answer boils down to sporting politics. If Britain were to field a Team GB football team at the Olympics, it might jeopardise the ability of the individual nations to enter FIFA and UEFA tournaments.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which governs the Olympics, does not recognise the individual independent countries and all British athletes compete together under the Team GB umbrella.

But at tournaments like the World Cup and the European Championship, all the British teams compete as their separate nations, under UEFA and FIFA rules.

The worry among the Football Associations of each country is that were the Brits to enter the Olympics as Team GB, they would have to compete in other tournaments as Team GB too, which none of them want to do.

To avoid that risk, there is no Team GB football team at the Olympics.

There are also other issues preventing a Team GB effort. Clubs aren’t required to release players for the Games and are reluctant to release them ahead of the restart of the regular season. Major rivalries within the team and between the different Football Associations over which players were included in the squad, and how well each nation would be represented, also complicates any potential decisions.

This hasn’t always been the case. Team GB fielded a combined men’s team at the home Olympics at London 2012, which was an exception to the usual rule given that it hosted the Games.

But aside from that one exception, there hasn’t been a men’s GB football side at an Olympics since 1960.

That 2012 squad – featuring the likes of Micah Richards and Ryan Giggs – wasn’t strictly speaking a fully British side as there were no Scottish or Northern Irish players, just English and Welsh. The 2012 team made the quarter-finals before losing to South Korea on penalties.

Going further back, GB is actually the joint-most successful nation in Olympic football. The team won gold on three occasions: in 1900, the first time football featured at the Games, and again in 1908 and 1912.

The situation is different for the women’s game, where the Olympics are viewed as a more presitigious tournament than on the men’s side and competition to qualify is fiercer. England played in the 2012 and 2020 editions, losing in the quarter-finals on both occasions, and women’s football has only been part of the Olympic programme since 1996.

For Paris, all four of the home nations – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – were keen to take part and agreed that the highest-ranking of the four would take a slot at the Olympics if they qualified.

The highest-ranking nation was England, but qualification proved a step too far.

Even reaching the World Cup final in 2023 wasn’t enough to guarantee qualification, so there will be no British representation at Paris this summer on the women’s side either.