It sounds like you would either:
Option 1: Have a separate matrix question for each country, that lists only that country's soccer clubs, and then use display logic to show the right question for each country. That would look something like this (I used Embedded Data instead of a question for the logic, but you will get the idea):

Option 2: Have one matrix question, with all the soccer clubs listed, and logic applied to each soccer club that says to display it if (x) country is selected (this would be extremely tedious to set up if the list is long, but would make the most sense if some clubs apply to multiple countries, as in the example below "Club 1" would apply to those in Brazil or Colombia) That would look like this as you set it up:

Thanks that is really helpful. We'd have about 14 questions for 30 countries with 10 to 16 clubs each. Your Option 1 would be doable, but would mean I have 14*30 questions, which would be a bit much. Option 2 is what we tried setting up, but this slowed the survey down too much (also there's a limit to the number of statements, so we had split the questions per country anyway.
I was hoping I could use display logic to show an entire list of clubs at once, but I guess that is not possible?
Thanks,
Maurits

Hi,
Just a couple additional things to consider as you set up this survey.
How do you intend to analyze the results? If you're using the Qualtrics reporting tools and comparing the results by club, or even by country, I agree that you should stay away from Loop & Merge. It simplifies the survey building, but your data won't be in alignment between respondents.
Can a respondent select more than one country in the first question?
If your main objective is to avoid a lot of copying and pasting, I would suggest CarolK 's Option 1. This can be done with little copying/pasting: just build a survey block for your first country and set up the question(s) in it. After you've built the complete block, use the Copy Block feature to duplicate it for each successive country; you won't have to copy and paste the questions, the only thing you'll need to change are the club names each time. After you've built all 30 country blocks, then set up the Display Logic from your country question to each block. The data will be in alignment between respondents because they are associated with unique blocks, unlike Loop & Merge.

Hi Matthew
Thanks for your detailed response. I will analyze the data in an external programme, like R or Stata.
I dont fully understand the drawback of loop & merge in this context. Why wont I be able to identify who filled in the survey for which country?
Since my survey has multiple block already, I assume I could also work with CarolK and your suggestion by adding branches in the survey flow?
Thanks so much!

Hi Maurits,
I don't mean to suggest that it would be impossible to work with the data if you used Loop & Merge, but it would introduce an extra level of complexity that you may not want to deal with if the survey allows respondents to select more than one country.
Let's say you have three countries to choose from in Q1: Netherlands, England and Germany. And let's also say there are 20 clubs in each country for your matrix question, Q2. (I know in real life that the Eredivisie and Bundesliga have 18, but let's pretend they're the same for this thought exercise.) With 20 clubs, there would be 20 columns of data.
In a Loop & Merge scenario, if respondent 1 selects Netherlands, their responses for Q2 will appear in columns 2-21. If respondent 2 selects England and Germany, their responses for the EPL will appear in columns 2-21, and the Bundesliga responses will appear in columns 22-41. And so on. As a result, any given range of columns will contain data for EPL, Eredivisie, or Bundesliga teams.
Since you're not using Qualtrics for analysis, perhaps you've already considered how to handle this with R or Stata, but I thought it was worth pointing out.
Best of luck!