Coral present the ultimate football counties study

Sam Barnard, Assistant Sports Editor | May 23, 2016

Coral’s football counties study

Surprise dearth of keepers for Merseyside
Six Yorkshire stars in England’s prelim Euro 2016 squad
Greater London only squad with established past and present PL players
Cheshire claim five past and present Man Utd players
Five West Ham names in Essex squad
Greater Manchester and Lancashire lack talent of years gone by

Check out which stars made your region’s XI in our map

Going by former Yorkshire cricket rules, where players only born within the county borders could represent them, Coral have come up with teams for each English region featuring current footballers that would be eligible.

Spanish territories such as Catalonia and the Basque Country regularly organise unofficial friendlies against each other and even nations, so why not in England too where passion runs high in all areas of the land?

From Bedfordshire to Yorkshire, and even lesser footballing regions such as Isle of Wight, Cornwall and Herefordshire, we’ve found starting XIs and squads for all but two ceremonial counties (City of London – which is within Greater London – and Rutland).

Coral have merged all four Yorkshires (North, East Riding, South and West) as one as well as Sussex (East and West), meaning in total our study consists of 42 teams. We have ranked their population and area size out of 44 territories, though, to include City of London and Rutland.