Why There Is No Team GB at the Commonwealth Games

At the Sandwell Aquatics Centre in Smethwick, during the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, Duncan Scott touched first in the men's 200 metres freestyle and Tom Dean touched second. A year earlier in Tokyo the order had been reversed by four hundredths of a second, and the day after that Olympic final the pair had stood on the same step of the podium with a relay gold medal each. In Tokyo both wore the Union flag. In Smethwick Scott was in Scottish kit, Dean in English, and the anthem played was Flower of Scotland.

The reason is structural and simple. The Commonwealth Games are entered by Commonwealth Games Associations, not by National Olympic Committees, and membership follows the Commonwealth's own idea of a country instead of the United Nations' idea of a state. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have an association of their own, as do the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. Each selects, funds and sends a separate team. No British association exists, so there is no British team to enter, and there has never been one in the history of the Games. Team GB is an Olympic creation and stops at the Olympic door.

Why there is no Team GB at the Commonwealth Games: entry by association

Start with who is allowed to send a team. The Commonwealth Games Federation, the body that owns the Games, is a club of national associations. Its constitution lists them by name, and a team can take part only if its association is on the list. At Birmingham in 2022 there were 72 teams, a number larger than the membership of the Commonwealth itself, because a good many of the entrants are not sovereign states at all.

That is the crux. The Federation has never required its members to be independent countries. It admits territories and dependencies alongside states: the Cook Islands, Norfolk Island, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, St Helena. Seen from that angle the four nations of the United Kingdom are an ordinary case. Each is a recognisable country with a sporting identity older than the Games, each had governing bodies of its own in most sports by 1930, and each was admitted as a member in its own right.

Commonwealth Games England is the association for England. It is a separate organisation from the British Olympic Association, with its own board, its own chef de mission at each Games and its own brand, Team England. Commonwealth Games Scotland does the same job north of the border as Team Scotland, and Wales and Northern Ireland have their equivalents. None of them answers to a British parent body, because none exists.

• 1British teams at an Olympics
• 7Teams at a Commonwealth Games
• 4Home nations among the seven
• 3Crown Dependencies among them

Teams entered from the United Kingdom and the Crown Dependencies at an Olympic Games and at a Commonwealth Games.

Nor could a British team simply be added alongside the others. An athlete can be entered by one association only, and a Great Britain association would be claiming the same swimmers and sprinters that England, Scotland and Wales already enter. The Federation's structure has room for a country to be represented once. For the United Kingdom that room was filled four times over in 1930, before anyone had thought of branding a British team.

So the question of why England competes separately in the Commonwealth Games has the same answer as why Scotland does, and the answer is membership. A British team could be created only if the four associations dissolved themselves into a new one, and the Federation's rules give them no reason to. Each member has a vote at the general assembly. Each can bid to host. Merging would turn four voices into one.

The wider format of the event, its sports and how host cities are chosen, is covered in our guide to how the Commonwealth Games work. This page stays with the British question.

Seven teams from the British Isles, not four

The usual shorthand is "the four home nations". The true count from these islands is seven, and the three that get forgotten are the most instructive.

The Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey are Crown Dependencies. They are not part of the United Kingdom, they have their own legislatures, and their people are British citizens. Each has a Commonwealth Games Association. The Isle of Man and Jersey have sent teams since the 1958 Games in Cardiff, and Guernsey joined them in Edinburgh in 1970. The Republic of Ireland is the island state that is absent: it left the Commonwealth in 1949 and takes no part.

Team	First appeared	Flag flown	Olympic team for its athletes
England	1930	St George's Cross	Team GB
Scotland	1930	Saltire	Team GB
Wales	1930	Red Dragon	Team GB
Northern Ireland	1934	Ulster Banner	Team GB or Ireland
Isle of Man	1958	Three Legs of Man	Team GB
Jersey	1958	Flag of Jersey	Team GB
Guernsey	1970	Flag of Guernsey	Team GB

The island teams are small and they are not there to make up numbers. Manx cycling in particular has a record that larger nations would accept. Mark Cavendish won the scratch race on the track for the Isle of Man at Melbourne in 2006, two years before his first Tour de France stage win and a decade before his Olympic silver medal for Great Britain. Guernsey won its first athletics medal at Birmingham in 2022, when Alastair Chalmers took bronze in the 400 metres hurdles at the Alexander Stadium in Perry Barr.

Guernsey also reached the podium on the bowling green at Leamington Spa in 2022, where Lucy Beere took silver in the women's singles. Lawn bowls and shooting have been the islands' steadiest sports over the years, since neither depends on the size of the population a team is drawn from.

What makes the islands instructive is the reversal. At an Olympics a Manx or Jersey athlete has exactly one route, which is Team GB, because the dependencies have no National Olympic Committee and under present rules cannot obtain one. At a Commonwealth Games the same athlete is not eligible for England at all unless they separately meet England's criteria. A Manx rider can train all year on a British Cycling programme in Manchester alongside English team-mates, race against them in a different jersey for eleven days, and return to the same track session the following week.

It also disposes of a common misunderstanding. The home nations do not compete separately because of devolution, or because of some special concession to Scotland and Wales. Territories far smaller and with far less autonomy have their own teams. The Commonwealth Games simply draw their map at a finer grain than the Olympics do.

Why the Olympics work the other way

The International Olympic Committee recognises National Olympic Committees, one per country, and the Olympic Charter defines a country as an independent state recognised by the international community. That definition was written into the Charter in 1996. Territories recognised before then kept their committees, which is why Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands march separately at an Olympic opening ceremony. Nothing recognised since has been anything other than a state.

For the United Kingdom the place has been held since 1905 by the British Olympic Association, formed that year at the House of Commons. Britain has sent a team to every summer Games of the modern era, and from the BOA's foundation that team has been entered by a single body on behalf of the whole kingdom. England, Scotland and Wales have never had separate Olympic recognition. They did not lose it. They never sought it at the point when it might have been granted, and by the time anyone raised the idea the door had been shut.

There is one curious footnote. At the London Games of 1908, which Britain organised, the hockey tournament included separate teams from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and they took all the medals between them. Every one was credited to Great Britain. It was a host's convenience to fill out a small field, and it was not repeated in that form.

The Paralympic movement follows the Olympic pattern. ParalympicsGB is a single team entered by the British Paralympic Association, and para-sport events at a Commonwealth Games, which are part of the main programme and count in the same medal table, are contested by the home nations separately like everything else there.

The result is a team whose official title, the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic Team, is longer than the brand. "Team GB" dates from 1999. Who is eligible for it and how its members are chosen is a subject of its own, set out in our explainer on how Team GB is picked.

The practical difference between the two systems can be put in a line. The Olympic movement asks which state an athlete is a citizen of. The Commonwealth Games ask which country within the Commonwealth an athlete belongs to. For most of the world those are the same question, and for the United Kingdom they are not.

What changes for an athlete between Team GB and Team England

Nearly everything administrative changes, and almost nothing about the athlete's daily training does.

Question	Olympic Games	Commonwealth Games
Who enters the team	British Olympic Association	The home nation's Commonwealth Games Association
Who nominates athletes	British governing body, such as UK Athletics	Home-nation governing body, such as England Athletics
Who pays for preparation	UK Sport, through World Class Programmes	Sport England, sportscotland, Sport Wales or Sport Northern Ireland
Flag on the kit	Union flag	National flag
Anthem for a gold medal	God Save the King	The home nation's own choice
Relay and crew partners	Any British athlete	Only athletes from the same home nation

Selection by a different panel to different standards

A British sprinter who wants to run at an Olympics is selected by UK Athletics under a British policy. The same sprinter, if English, is selected for a Commonwealth Games by England Athletics under an English policy, nominated to Commonwealth Games England and confirmed by it. The standards are separate documents. They are often easier to meet, because the nation is filling its own allocation and not competing with the other three for places, though England in the strong athletics and swimming events can be harder to get into than some Olympic teams.

For Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish athletes the gap is wider. A Welsh swimmer ranked fourth in Britain in an event will not go to an Olympics, where two per nation may swim. She will very likely go to a Commonwealth Games and may reach a final. For a large number of athletes outside England the Commonwealth Games are the biggest multi-sport event they will ever compete in, which is a considerable part of why the smaller home nations value them.

Funding from a different purse

UK Sport's remit is Olympic and Paralympic success, and it has no role in Commonwealth Games teams. Preparation is paid for by the home-country sports councils, mostly from National Lottery money, and by each association's own sponsors. In practice the athlete's coach, training base and support staff stay the same, since the British programme does not stop for a Commonwealth year, but the camp, the kit and the travel are the home nation's affair. How the British side of that money works is explained in our guide to UK Sport and Lottery funding.

Team-mates as opponents

The British men's 4x200 metres freestyle relay that won Olympic gold in Tokyo was made up of Tom Dean, James Guy, Matt Richards and Duncan Scott, with Calum Jarvis swimming the heat. At Birmingham a year later that squad was spread over three teams: Dean and Guy for England, Richards and Jarvis for Wales, Scott for Scotland. No home nation could field the Olympic quartet. The reigning Olympic champions, as a team, were simply not at the Games.

Athletes mostly describe the switch as enjoyable. The rivalry is real, the stakes are lower than at an Olympics, and beating a training partner carries its own satisfaction. Coaches are more ambivalent, since a British head coach may spend a Commonwealth Games watching athletes they work with daily, in three sets of kit, from a seat in the stand.

How eligibility is decided between the home nations

A passport cannot settle it. An English athlete and a Scottish athlete hold the same British passport, and so do a Manx one and a Jersey one. The Commonwealth Games Federation's rules recognise the problem directly: where several members share a common nationality, eligibility is decided by criteria that those associations set and the Federation approves.

The usual tests are three. Birth in the country. A parent born in the country. Or residence there for a qualifying period of continuous years immediately before the Games. Each association publishes its own version, and the residence period and the fine print are not identical from one to the next, so anyone with a claim on two nations should read both documents.

1. 1British citizenshipThe athlete must first be a citizen of the United Kingdom, a Crown Dependency or another Commonwealth country.
2. 2Place of birthBirth in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland gives eligibility for that nation.
3. 3Parent's birthplaceA mother or father born in a different home nation opens a second option.
4. 4ResidenceA period of continuous residence in a nation, set by its association, opens another.
5. 5DeclarationAn athlete who qualifies for more than one chooses, and the choice is recorded when they first compete.
6. 6Later transferChanging nation afterwards needs the agreement of the associations involved and the Federation.

The usual sequence of tests applied by the home-nation Commonwealth Games Associations. Each association publishes its own wording and qualifying periods.

For most athletes all three tests point the same way. The interesting cases are those where they do not, and British sport has plenty.

Jake Wightman, world 1500 metres champion in 2022, was born in Nottingham and has run for Scotland throughout his career, having grown up in Edinburgh. Hannah Miley and Jazz Carlin were both born in Swindon. Miley was raised in Aberdeenshire and won two Commonwealth titles for Scotland in the 400 metres individual medley, and Carlin moved to Swansea and won the 800 metres freestyle for Wales at Glasgow in 2014. Steph Twell was born in Colchester, had a Scottish mother, and chose Scotland before the 2010 Games in Delhi, where she won a bronze medal over 1500 metres.

Every one of those athletes was British at the Olympics and none had to choose there. At the Commonwealth Games the choice is theirs and it is not always sentimental. An athlete on the edge of selection for England may be a certain pick for Scotland or Wales, and a parent's birthplace is as valid a ground as their own.

Switching afterwards is deliberately harder than choosing the first time. An athlete who has already competed for one home nation at a Commonwealth Games cannot simply appear for another at the next. The associations involved have to agree and the Federation has to approve, a safeguard against the nations recruiting from one another before each Games. Transfers do happen, usually after a long change of residence, and they are uncommon enough to be noticed when they do.

Anthems and flags without God Save the King

God Save the King is the anthem of the United Kingdom, and at the Commonwealth Games no team represents the United Kingdom. That leaves each home nation to pick a song of its own, and two of them changed theirs in the same year.

Nation	Victory anthem	Words and music	Flag
England	Jerusalem	William Blake, set by Hubert Parry in 1916	St George's Cross
Scotland	Flower of Scotland	Roy Williamson of The Corries, 1960s	Saltire
Wales	Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau	Evan James and James James, 1856	Red Dragon
Northern Ireland	Londonderry Air	Traditional melody, first published in 1855	Ulster Banner

England: Jerusalem, by public vote

England has no official anthem of its own. For decades its Commonwealth champions heard Land of Hope and Glory, Elgar's tune with A. C. Benson's words. Before the 2010 Games in Delhi, Commonwealth Games England put the matter to a public vote with three candidates: Land of Hope and Glory, Jerusalem and God Save the Queen. Jerusalem won clearly and has been used since.

The reasons for holding a vote at all were practical. Athletes had been canvassed and were divided. England's football and rugby union teams sing the national anthem, English cricket had taken up Jerusalem, and there was no agreed answer for the association to adopt quietly. A poll gave the decision a legitimacy that a committee could not. It also produced the slightly odd result that England's sporting anthem depends on the sport.

Scotland: Flower of Scotland, chosen by the athletes

Scotland made its change at almost the same moment and by a different electorate. Scottish winners had for many years been played Scotland the Brave. In 2010 Commonwealth Games Scotland asked its athletes to choose, and they picked Flower of Scotland, already long established at Murrayfield and Hampden.

Wales and Northern Ireland

Wales has never needed a debate. Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, written in Pontypridd in 1856, has been the country's anthem at sporting occasions for well over a century and was sung before a rugby international in Cardiff as early as 1905.

Northern Ireland's choices are the most careful of the four. Its winners hear the Londonderry Air, the melody collected in County Londonderry in the nineteenth century and best known as the tune of Danny Boy. It has no words in this setting, which is part of the point: a team drawn from both of Northern Ireland's communities needs a tune that neither finds unwelcome. The flag is harder. Northern Ireland has had no official flag of its own since 1973, and the team uses the Ulster Banner, the flag of the old Stormont government. It remains a contested emblem.

The three islands have theirs too. A gold medal for Guernsey would bring Sarnia Cherie, and the Isle of Man has its own national anthem, O Land of Our Birth.

Team sports that exist only as home nations

In individual sports the split rearranges people who would have been at the Games anyway. In team sports it creates and destroys whole sides.

Hockey is the clearest example. At an Olympics there is a Great Britain men's team and a Great Britain women's team, each drawn from players of the English, Scottish and Welsh associations. At World Cups, European Championships and Commonwealth Games those players turn out for England, Scotland or Wales. A Great Britain squad cannot be entered at a Commonwealth Games, so its Scottish and Welsh members go back to their own national sides. England's women took a Commonwealth title of their own at Birmingham in 2022, beating Australia in the final. The full arrangement is set out in our guide to why Great Britain and England hockey both exist.

The effect on strength runs in one direction. England supplies most of a typical Great Britain squad, so an England side loses a handful of Scottish and Welsh team-mates and remains a contender. Scotland and Wales lose access to the English majority and compete several rungs lower. A Scottish player good enough for Great Britain will spend an Olympic cycle in a team aiming at a medal and a Commonwealth fortnight in one aiming at the top six.

Rugby sevens works the same way. Team GB sides were assembled for the Olympics from 2016, when the men won silver in Rio, and England, Scotland and Wales have entered separately at the Commonwealth Games, where sevens was played from 1998. Our page on the Team GB sevens programme explains how the combined squad is put together.

Netball is different again, because it has no Olympic existence and therefore no British team in any form. It is a home-nation sport at every level. England's gold medal on the Gold Coast in 2018, won 52-51 against Australia with a goal in the last second, was the country's first Commonwealth netball title, a high point described in our profile of the England Roses.

Football is the mirror image of all this: a sport in which the home nations exist everywhere and the British team almost nowhere, for reasons covered in our explainer on the missing Team GB football side.

One caution about the future of this section. Team sports are expensive to stage and the Commonwealth Games have been shrinking. The reduced programme adopted for Glasgow 2026 left out both hockey and rugby sevens. Whether they return depends on later hosts, and a Games without them has fewer places in which the British-versus-home-nation question arises at all.

Northern Ireland's particular position

Paddy Barnes, a light-flyweight from Belfast, won Olympic bronze medals for Ireland in 2008 and 2012 and Commonwealth gold medals for Northern Ireland in 2010 and 2014. Michael Conlan, from the same city, won Olympic bronze for Ireland in London and Commonwealth gold for Northern Ireland in Glasgow two years later. Neither man changed allegiance between the two. Both were doing exactly what the structure of their sport provides for.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom whose athletes regularly have a real choice of Olympic team, and the only one whose Commonwealth team includes large numbers of another country's Olympians. Amateur boxing is governed across the whole island by one association, so a boxer from Belfast or Derry is developed in the Irish system and goes to an Olympics in green. The Republic is not in the Commonwealth and sends no team, so at the Commonwealth Games the same boxer is eligible only for Northern Ireland. Boxing has been the team's richest source of medals as a result, supplying most of its golds at Birmingham in 2022, and the Commonwealth carries its own weight in the professional ring too, as our guide to the Commonwealth title in boxing describes.

The same pattern holds, less starkly, in swimming, cycling, hockey and gymnastics. It produces a team in which one athlete may be a British Olympian, the next an Irish one, and a third has never been either.

Mostly this passes without friction. Occasionally it does not, and the trouble tends to come from international federations and not from the athletes. Before Birmingham 2022 the International Gymnastics Federation initially ruled that Rhys McClenaghan and two team-mates could not compete for Northern Ireland because they were registered internationally as Irish gymnasts. McClenaghan had won the pommel horse for Northern Ireland on the Gold Coast four years earlier. The ruling was reversed after an outcry from both sides of the border, and he competed. Two years later he was Olympic champion for Ireland.

That episode showed where the weak point is. Olympic sport assumes one athlete, one country. The Commonwealth Games assume something looser, and Northern Ireland sits in the gap between the two assumptions. Its athletes are entitled under the Belfast Agreement to be Irish, British or both, and the sports calendar asks them to be one thing in one year and another in the next. Most manage it more easily than the administrators do.

Team GB vs Team England: how the results compare

A Commonwealth Games medal table flatters and misleads in roughly equal measure, and reading it against an Olympic one takes some care.

At Birmingham in 2022 Australia finished first with 67 gold medals. England were second with 57. The other home nations followed some way down.

Team	Gold medals	Total medals
Australia	67	178
England	57	176
Scotland	13	51
Wales	8	28
Northern Ireland	7	18

Australia67golds

England57golds

Scotland13golds

Wales8golds

Northern Ireland7golds

Final medal table of the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Totals at later Games will differ, and a home Games tends to lift the host's count.

Show the numbers

Gold medals at Birmingham 2022, home nations and Australia

Item	Value
Australia	67golds
England	57golds
Scotland	13golds
Wales	8golds
Northern Ireland	7golds

Add the four home nations together and the sum is 85 golds, comfortably more than Australia. The sum is not what a British team would have won. A single team would have been limited to one nation's entry in every event, three sprinters in the 100 metres where the four nations between them had up to twelve, and one relay team in place of four. English and Scottish swimmers who shared a podium would have been competing for the same places on one team. The honest reading is that a combined team would have topped the table and by less than the arithmetic suggests.

Three further distortions matter when comparing England's showing with Great Britain's at an Olympics.

The field is different. Of the ten nations at the top of the medal table at the Paris Olympics in 2024, two are in the Commonwealth: Australia and Great Britain itself. The United States, China, Japan, France, the Netherlands, South Korea, Italy and Germany are all absent from a Commonwealth Games. In gymnastics, diving, judo and boxing that removes most of the world's best. In swimming and track cycling, where Australia is a power, it removes far less. In the sprints and distance events on the track, Jamaica and the East African nations make a Commonwealth final close to world class.

The programme is different. Great Britain's Olympic medals lean heavily on sports the Commonwealth Games do not stage.

Rowing was last contested at a Commonwealth Games in 1986. Sailing and equestrian sport have no place there. More than half of Britain's fourteen golds in Paris came in rowing, equestrian, sailing, sport climbing, trampoline and shooting, none of which was on the Birmingham programme in 2022, and the Commonwealth programme in turn includes lawn bowls, netball and squash, which the Olympics lack.

The stakes are different. A Commonwealth Games falls in the middle of an Olympic cycle. Some leading athletes skip it to protect a world championship season, others use it to try a new event, and British programmes do not peak for it. England's tally says a good deal about depth and rather little about what Great Britain will do two years later.

Where the arrangement comes from: Hamilton 1930 and the Victorian unions

The first British Empire Games were held in Hamilton, Ontario, in August 1930. Eleven teams came. Among them were England, Scotland, Wales and a single team from Ireland, entered separately and treated as four of the Empire's countries alongside Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Nobody appears to have argued for a British team, and the reason lies sixty years further back.

By 1930 British sport had been organised nation by nation for two generations. The Football Association was founded in 1863, the Scottish FA in 1873, the Football Association of Wales in 1876 and the Irish FA in 1880. Rugby followed the same course within a decade. The first international football match, Scotland against England in Glasgow in 1872, established that the natural opponents of an English team were Scottish, and the home championships that grew from it made the four-nation contest the normal form of British international sport. Athletics, swimming and boxing each had separate English and Scottish associations well before Hamilton. When the Games' Canadian organiser, Bobby Robinson, issued invitations, he was writing to bodies that already existed.

There was a British precedent of a kind. At the Festival of Empire in London in 1911 a small inter-Empire championship was held at the Crystal Palace, and the home side competed as one United Kingdom team against Canada, South Africa and Australasia. It is the only occasion on which something like a British team has taken part in a forerunner of the Games. The model was not followed.

The split within Ireland came next. In 1934, at the second Games in London, the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland entered separately. The Free State did not return, and Northern Ireland has competed in its own name ever since.

Why no merger has been seriously proposed

The arrangement has survived three changes of name, from British Empire Games to Commonwealth Games, and the end of the Empire that gave it its first title. It has never faced a serious campaign to replace it, for reasons that are easy to list.

Nobody with a vote wants it. The home-nation associations would be abolishing themselves. Scotland and Wales in particular treat the Games as the one global stage on which they appear under their own flags, and Scotland has hosted them in Edinburgh twice and in Glasgow twice. England, the only nation large enough to be indifferent, gains a team it can call its own and a medal table it can top.

The athletes do not want it either. A merged team would cut the number of British competitors at each Games by a large margin, and those cut would be exactly the ones for whom the event matters most.

The pressure, where there has been any, has run the other way. Scottish politicians have at times called for a separate Scottish Olympic team on the Commonwealth model. The Olympic Charter rules it out for any nation that is not an independent state, so that argument is in the end one about the constitution and not about sport.

What remains is an accident of history that works. The Olympics show British sport as one team, and the Commonwealth Games show it as the federation of rival national bodies that it has been since the 1870s. Both pictures are accurate. For more on the Olympic sports as they are played in this country, see our England guides and our athletics hub.