Each soccer team has 11 players on the field - 10 outfield players plus 1 goalkeeper. A standard match is 11 vs 11. With the squad, teams usually have 23 players total, with 7 substitutes on the bench.
Sport is one of humanity's most ancient and most enduring institutions - a domain where the full range of human qualities is put on vivid, public display. Courage and determination, teamwork and individual brilliance, physical excellence and strategic intelligence, the agony of defeat and the ecstasy of victory - all of these are compressed into the minutes and hours of athletic competition in ways that make sport a kind of concentrated, heightened version of life itself. Small wonder that billions of people around the world feel such passionate identification with their teams and athletes. Every major sport carries its own rich history, its own culture, its own philosophy of what excellence looks like and how it is achieved. Football - known as soccer in North America - is perhaps the truest global game, played with passionate intensity in every nation on Earth, from the pristine pitches of European stadiums to the dusty streets of African villages. Its pinnacle is the FIFA World Cup, a tournament that commands the attention of the entire world every four years, uniting and dividing humanity in equal measure. Brazil, the sport's most decorated nation with five World Cup triumphs, has produced a style of play so creative, so joyful, and so aesthetically beautiful that it has been elevated to something approaching art. Basketball, born in a Massachusetts gymnasium in 1891 from a peach basket and a soccer ball, has evolved into a global spectacle of athletic artistry. The slam dunk - that emphatic, acrobatic finish that brings crowds to their feet - encapsulates everything exciting about the sport: power, grace, timing, and an element of sheer theatrical audacity. Tennis, with its peculiar scoring system inherited from medieval France - where "love" means zero and a game progresses through 15, 30, and 40 - has been played at the highest levels for over a century, demanding extraordinary physical conditioning combined with split-second tactical intelligence. The Olympic Games, revived in Athens in 1896 after a fifteen-century hiatus, brought together athletes from nations large and small under the ideal of peaceful international competition, symbolized by five interlocking rings representing the five inhabited continents of the world. And the marathon - that grueling 42.195-kilometer test of human endurance - carries within its precise distance a story about the 1908 London Olympics, the British royal family, and the peculiar historical accidents that shape even the most fundamental facts of the sporting world. Test your knowledge of these and many more fascinating sports facts, and discover how much of this rich world you truly know.