Which countries have played the most Premier League football?

Ireland's 17,171 appearances come from 212 players, an average of 81 each, matched in the top twenty only by Wales. Scotland has more players, 218, but fewer appearances, 14,261, at 65 each. Irish players in the Premier League have tended to stay a long time. Shay Given, Richard Dunne, Robbie Keane, Roy Keane and Séamus Coleman all made several hundred appearances, and long careers lift the average.

Scotland's decline is visible in the averages. In the 1990s Scottish players were everywhere in English football, and the Premier League's early seasons were full of them. The supply thinned as clubs recruited from further afield, and the averages reflect it: more Scottish players than Irish, but fewer games each.

Wales has 11,305 appearances from 139 players, 81 each, matching Ireland. One man accounts for an outsized share: Ryan Giggs's 632 appearances are more than five per cent of the Welsh total on their own. Northern Ireland, with 5,645 from 74 players, is level with Belgium.

In fact the middle of this table is almost a dead heat. Portugal (5,740), Denmark (5,684), Argentina (5,683), Norway (5,678), Belgium (5,664) and Northern Ireland (5,645) are separated by 95 appearances, about three seasons of one regular player. Six countries with very different footballing histories have played almost exactly the same amount of Premier League football, and a single long career, Giggs-sized, would be enough to reorder all of them.

Norway's 5,678 appearances from 77 players put it twelfth, ahead of Germany (5,069 from 89 players) and Italy (3,860 from 91). Most of Norway's total was built in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Premier League clubs signed Norwegian players in large numbers: Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Ronny Johnsen and Henning Berg at Manchester United, Tore André Flo at Chelsea, John Arne Riise at Liverpool, and many more at Blackburn, Southampton and Wimbledon. They were relatively cheap and spoke good English, which made them an easy first step abroad for clubs that had rarely signed foreign players.

Italy's total is the most striking for its average. Ninety-one Italian players have made only 42 appearances each, the lowest average in the table by some distance. Gianfranco Zola, Paolo Di Canio and Gianluca Vialli are the famous names, but the typical Italian Premier League career was a season or two, often late in a player's career, before going home.

Germany is similar but less extreme, at 57 per player. For most of the Premier League era, Germany's best players mostly stayed at home, and those who came were often young players looking for a first chance or veterans on a last contract. Sweden is lower still, at 51 per player across 78 players.

France's second place is the product of a long run of signings that started with Eric Cantona and gathered pace under Arsène Wenger at Arsenal from 1996: Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry, Robert Pires, Emmanuel Petit and Nicolas Anelka all arrived in his first few years. France has the most players of any country after England, 255, and its average of 70 appearances is close to England's 80.

Spain's 11,118 come from 178 players, most of them in the second half of the Premier League's history. Spanish players were rare in the 1990s and common after Rafael Benítez arrived at Liverpool in 2004 and brought several with him. Others followed: Cesc Fàbregas, David Silva, Juan Mata, César Azpilicueta and David de Gea. The Netherlands, with 10,847 from 166, was the more common source earlier on.

Argentina's 88 players, with Carlos Tevez, Pablo Zabaleta and Sergio Agüero among them, sit eleventh, a single appearance behind Denmark. Brazil is eighth with 9,283 from 137 players, which surprises people who think of Brazil as the world's great exporter of footballers. For most of this period Brazilian players heading to Europe went first to Spain, Portugal or Italy, where the language or the work-permit rules were easier, and England came later.

Jamaica is seventeenth, with 4,612 appearances from 60 players. Many of those players were born and raised in England and chose to represent Jamaica internationally, Wes Morgan and Michail Antonio among them. Under this table's single-nationality rule, their whole Premier League careers count for Jamaica. Nigeria (4,704 from 59) and Senegal (3,702 from 47) also count players born or raised in Europe, Alex Iwobi, who grew up in London, among them.

Senegal's 47 players averaged 79 appearances each, almost exactly England's average, and Nigeria's 59 averaged 80. Players from both countries who reached the Premier League tended to stay, which is the opposite of the Italian pattern.

In Passport Control, these are the countries worth practising. Naming a club's English players is easy, and so, usually, is naming its French ones. Naming every Norwegian who played for Blackburn, or every Jamaican international at Leicester, is where the game is won.

English players have made almost as many Premier League appearances as the next nineteen countries combined. The rest of the order is a history of where English clubs were shopping, and when.