Guinea

Kamil Zayatte (Istanbul BB / Turkey)
Guinea vs. Ghana (1:1) | AFCON 2012 in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon

Guinea and especially Pascal Feinduono are the main reason why I fell in love with African football!

In the 2004 African Cup in Tunisia he scored 2 goals and thanks to him and Titi Camara they made it to the Quarter Finals, just losing 1:2 to Mali.
This was the first Africa Cup I ever saw and since then I guess I just missed a handful matches on TV. The guy who most impressed me in all those years was without a doubt Pascal Feinduono, followed by Aubameyang and of course the amazing Rigoberto Song.
Unfortunately Feinduono does not play for Guinea anymore and without him they do not regularly qualify anymore. But I still hope for a second Feinduono to be born in Guinea one day!

The shirt itself obviously is fantastic! Just as all Guinea shirts it has a deep red and a deep yellow, which both are amazing! Besides it is made by the African brand Airness, who usually do great shirts! All in all I have to thank Gregorio again for this absolutely amazing shirt! Thank you!

Argentina

Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona / Spain)
Argentina vs. Netherlands (0:0) | WC 2006 in Germany

This shirt also came for the mission "make the world a greener place" from Gregorio. So thanks again!
The design is the same boring design that Argentina wears since 2000 B.C.. Well, boring or classic! I guess any other design would cause a huge riot inside Argentina.

Nevertheless this 2006 shirt is something special for every German. In the 2006 World Cup the whole German media was sure that we are chanceless to get far and that Argentina is the huge favorite to win the title. In the end we not even beat them by penalties (because of the amazing "analysis paper" of Oliver Kahn), but Lukas Podolski was chosen to be the best young player of the tournament just beating Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Definetely the whole country's spirit changed when we beat Argentina and everybody felt what is possible. Unfortunately, and the only time I ever cried in public during football, not the best team won the trophy... There was some other, blue shirted, team that just was better in diving, simulating, crying and protesting...

Gabon 2

Gabon vs. Togo 2002

All my thanks go to Pablo Aro Geraldes for this amazing Gabon shirt!
Especially since Patrick Emerick Aubameyang is nowadays showing the Bundesliga in Dortmund how good African players are technically and scoring I fell in love with Gabon. During their home African Cup of Nations in 2012 Aubameyang got something like a superstar in his hom country and was the hero with a couple of goals for the team!
Unfortunately their amazing campaign ended when they lost in the Quarter Finals, but I will personally never forget this remarkable tournament when Aubameyang replace Daniel Cousin as the national hero.
I really hope that we will see this technically fine and very enthusiastic team in a World Cup one day.

The shirt itself is much older than the success of Gabon in football. It is somewhere off the 90s and made by Kappa. Quite a cool design I think and very different to the others I do have already.

Ghana

Prince Tagoe (TSG 1899 Hoffenheim / Germany)
Ghana vs. Germany (0:1) | WC 2010 in South Africa

This finally is a shirt of one of my favorite teams overall, the Black Stars of Ghana. Unlucky as they are they need to play against Germany in group stage whenever they make it to the World Cup. But they got runners-up in 2010 and then even made it to the Quarter Finals.
Unfortunately they then got robbed a goal by Luis Suarez, which stole them the first African Semi Final display in history. As their Semi Final opponent would have been the Netherlands it seems certain they would have make it to the Final then (who except for Uruguay minus Suarez would ever loose against the Netherlands ;) ).
The shirt is quite nice, too. It is the typical 2010 Puma design with the "look-through" shoulder and their symbol (the black star) on that part.
Hopefully we will see them in the next WC final in Brazil against their group stage opponent Germany this time!

I nearly forgot: All thanks go to Gregorio again!

Austria

 

Martin Stranzl (Borussia Mönchengladbach / Germany)

This time I have to thank a fellow German collector of football shirts (clubs and national teams). He just gave me this absolutely stunning Stranzl matchworn Austria shirt! Thanks Chris for an amazing shirt! I pretty love the pixel design of the numbering a lot!
I hope you are also happy with your Cape Verde shirt ;)

Russia

Andrey Arshavin (Zenit St. Petersburg)
Russia vs. Liechtenstein (1:0) | WC 2010 qualifiers | 2009 in Liechtenstein

Thanks again Gregorio for another amazing shirt! Again the main reason behind this buy was to make my world map greener, but besides that effect I got a stunning shirt, too. Probably the most amazing design of one of the better teams in Europe I saw for ages!
I really love this shirt and the equivalent home shirt!

USA

Landon Donovan (LA Galaxy)
USA vs. Poland (3:0) | friendly 2008 in Poland

Thanks again to Gregorio for making my map look much greener!
The US Boys are usually not the best in football, which they still call soccer, because the sport you play without feet with an egg is called football instead for some strange reason...
Nevertheless they are a powerhouse in the CONCACAF zone and challenge with Mexico for most continental trophies.
Unfortunately they did a huge mistake hiring a pure motivator instead of a proper coach lately. Klinsmann somehow managed to scream them to the World Cup in Brazil, but I am pretty sure they will finish their group pointless this time...sorry boys.

Mexico

Salvador Carmona (Toluca)
Mexico vs. USA (0:2) | WC 2002 in South Korea

For about 2 years I am collecting football shirts of national team now. Through this I found many other collectors all around the world and I am in a more or less steady contact with them. Surprisingly I found out that besides the UK, Mexico seems the "epicenter of national team football shirt collecting". Nowhere except the UK it seems to be so "popular" to collect shirts of national teams. With popular I do not at all mean that every third Mexican collects football shirts, but that I know 3 (in words: THREE) collectors over there!
Speaking in numbers of national team football shirts this is quite a number.
All of them, Enrique, Oscar and Yasef (I do not know his "real life" name) do have amazing collections and even more are very nice guys. All of them helped me some time to sort out some bizarre rarity and I really appreciate that a lot! Unfortunately none of them ever send me a Mexican shirt, though...
So I really needed to buy this Mexico shirt from the only Belgian collector, Gregorio!
As I wanted my map to look a bit a greener I just bought a bunch of "large country shirts" now. Thanks Gregorio for making me a pretty fair price on quite a lot of shirts!

Cape Verde

Platini (Santa Clara / Portugal)
Cape Verde vs South Africa (0-0), AFCON 2013 in South Africa

Finally I had some spare money to buy this absolutely amazing football shirt. Not only the Cape Verde national team has players like "Platini" (by far the most sympathic of the both Platinis in football), has one of the most amazing national shirt and loads of wonderful shark merchandise stuff. They also are getting pretty good during the last years. They just made it to the African Cup of Nations for the first time in 2013 and with draws against South Africa and Morocco and a close win over Angola they directly made it through the group stage. Unfortunately they went down 0:2 against African powerhouse Ghana in the Quarter Finals then.
The team even qualified for the 2014 World Cup playoffs before their last match (a 2:0 win over Tunisia) was awarded 3:0 for Tunisia. This was due to the fact that the Cape Verde team did field the player "Varela", who was suspended for a previous match against Equatorial Guinea. As this match against Equatorial Guinea was awarded 3:0 for Cape Verde (for fielding a suspended player by Equatorial Guinea) the ban could not be done in this suspended match and was therefor still active against Tunisia.
Are you confused ? Well, probably Cape Verde was also confused and thus made this stupid mistake. Too bad that the CAF does not warn the teams or gives them a list of suspended players for each team. This way about 8 matches of the last World Cup campaign where awarded to someone for this reason, which makes the whole Qualifiers a pure joke.