Short answer: at least 15 of the 45 FIFA World Cup teams have been occupied or colonized by England or the British Empire at some point. The exact count depends on whether you include short-lived occupations, mandates, and territories that were under British administration rather than formal colonial rule.

Why the number is fuzzy

The phrase “occupied or colonized by England” can mean a few different things:

  • Direct English colonization in the earlier imperial period.
  • British colonial rule later on, which is usually what people mean in historical counts.
  • Temporary occupation during war, which is not always treated the same as colonization.

So the answer is not a perfectly clean statistic, but a historical estimate.

Likely included teams

Examples of World Cup teams with British/English colonial or occupation history include:

  • India
  • Pakistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Australia
  • New Zealand
  • Canada
  • South Africa
  • Nigeria
  • Ghana
  • Kenya
  • Jamaica
  • Trinidad and Tobago
  • Iraq
  • Kuwait
  • Qatar

That list alone already gets you to about 15 , and the total can rise if you count more Middle Eastern, African, Caribbean, and Pacific teams with British imperial ties.

Practical answer

If you want a clean one-line answer for a post, I’d write: Roughly 15 or more of the 45 World Cup teams have been occupied or colonized by England or the British Empire, depending on how strictly you define “occupied” and “colonized.”

Note on wording

“England” is historically a bit narrower than “Britain” or “British Empire,” and most colonial history questions like this are really about the British Empire rather than England alone.