Great Britain (GB) will once again be without a football team at the 2024 Olympics in Paris and fans want to know exactly why that is.
12 years ago, there was a UK men's football team competing at the 2012 London Olympics, featuring a number of English and Welsh stars including Micah Richards and Ryan Giggs.
However, the squad had no players from Scotland or Northern Ireland and had to stop in the quarter-finals.
That was also the first time the UK had a men's soccer team competing at the Olympics since 1960. But then, in the following Olympics - 2016, 2020, there was none. And the same goes for the 2024 Olympics!
At Tokyo 2020, Great Britain had a women's soccer team participate, but lost in the quarterfinals to Australia. This year, neither men's nor women's soccer will participate.
In the history of the Olympics, except for 1932, football has been one of the sports at the Summer Olympics since 1900. Olympic football is under the jurisdiction of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), not the FIFA, the governing body of both the World Cup and EURO.
In FIFA competitions, each UK country has its own team - England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
But the problem is that the IOC, unlike FIFA, sees the UK as one entity - having seen Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland leave in 1960 - amid fears their Olympic participation could threaten threaten their position in tournaments run by FIFA.
A unique compromise was reached at the 2012 Olympics, as the event was held in England, but even that attracted much controversy and backlash, especially from Scotland.
Since then there has been no UK men's football team - sad news for many - as the sport is loved by the UK.
With women's football, unlike the men's team, Scottish players appeared in the most recent squad, including Caroline Weir and Kim Little at the 2020 Olympics.
Great Britain had hoped to field a women's team for Paris 2024 but sadly their team did not qualify.
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have agreed that the highest-ranked country among the four will win one of three places for European teams, if they qualify.
However, England, who had the best results among the four teams, failed to qualify, while France, Spain and Germany occupied those three spots at the 2024 Olympics .
