The Dominican Republic national football team is governed by the Federación Dominicana de Fútbol, which was founded in 1953 and is based in the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean nation sharing the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. The federation became a FIFA affiliate in 1958 and joined CONCACAF in 1964, operating within the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) at the regional level.
The team played its first competitive matches in May 1967, entering a two-legged Olympic qualifier against Haiti. Both legs ended in heavy defeats — 8–0 and 6–0 — and the pattern of difficult results continued through the late 1960s and 1970s in tournaments such as the Central American and Caribbean Games and the Pan American Games. A modest bright spot came in 1986, when the team finished third at the Central American and Caribbean Games, representing the best result of that era. Participation in the 2012 Caribbean Cup offered another rare appearance at a regional tournament.
For much of the Dominican Republic's history, football has competed for attention against baseball, the country's dominant sport. This cultural reality has long been cited as a contributing factor in the team's limited progress on the international stage.
The most significant chapter in the team's history arrived in the 2024–25 CONCACAF Nations League B, when the Dominican Republic won all of their group matches — against Bermuda, Dominica, and Antigua and Barbuda — to claim promotion to Nations League A and secure qualification for the 2025 CONCACAF Gold Cup. It marked the first time the nation had ever qualified for a continental football tournament, signalling a new and potentially transformative era for Dominican football.