World Cup 2026 players, by the numbers

Every four years, the World Cup hands us a little census: a few hundred of the planet's best footballers, listed with their age, height, club, and name. This analysis is based on that data.

Age & Height

The average age of the players is 27 years 164 days. Seven players are 40 or older, and 21 are younger than 20.

Average height is 182.8 cm. A ten-centimeter range (175–185 cm) includes more than half of the players. Overall, 85% of the players are between 170 and 190 cm tall.

Some heights have unusual spikes, e.g. 180 cm and 185 cm. Some squad lists were probably filled in with approximate values.

Panama has the oldest national team, with an average age of 30. Côte d'Ivoire is almost five years younger.

The tallest nations at the World Cup are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Belgium. Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Qatar, Mexico, and Argentina are at the other end of the list.

By position

Goalkeepers are both the oldest and the tallest group; the outfield positions cluster much closer together.

The full height distribution shows that there are no goalkeepers shorter than 178 cm.

Birthdays

More players were born in the first half of the year: 55%, compared with 45% from July to December. In particular, 123 players were born in February, and only 80 in November. That's the well-known relative age effect — youth selection cutoffs favor kids born earlier in the calendar year, and those advantages compound over careers.

Two dates are each shared by 10 players: February 25 and December 20. By the way, do you see your birthday among these busy dates?

Players born on these popular dates include Arda Güler and Kylian Mbappé.

A total of 151 players have a birthday during the World Cup; that’s 12.1% of all players. Four people were born on the day of the opening match (including, for example, Kai Havertz and Unai Simón), and three will celebrate their birthday on the day of the final.

Clubs

A total of 448 distinct clubs supply players to the World Cup, representing 71 countries. Manchester City FC sent the most players to the tournament, followed by FC Bayern München and Paris Saint-Germain.

If we group clubs by league country, we see English dominance: 16% of the participants play in England.

Each national team at the World Cup has at least one footballer playing abroad. However, the list of the most "home-based" teams is quite diverse: from Qatar and Saudi Arabia to England and Germany. Six national teams have no footballers playing at home.

The national-team × club-country web

The following chart shows "football migration". Each row represents a national team (most home-based at the top); each column is a country where players are based. The darker a cell, the larger the share of that squad playing there — and the boxed cell marks players based at home.

Some routes are obvious: the Dutch, Scots and Swedes tend to play in England, while Austrians go to Germany.

Names

The average name length is 12.5 characters; given and family names were analyzed together, with spaces excluded.

Players from Uzbekistan, Uruguay, and Norway have the longest names (14 characters or more). The shortest names are among players from Brazil, Korea Republic, and Spain. Uzbek names are 1.5 times longer than Brazilian names.

The most frequent letters in the names are A, E, I, N, and O. Q appears only 25 times among 1,248 players.

For each team, we searched for letter appearing far more often than it does across the whole tournament — a fingerprint of its language.

For example, J appears especially frequently in English names, K in Turkish names, and C in Croatian names. The common explanation is patterns in family names, e.g. V has an affinity with Uzbek names, because 25 of the 26 Uzbek players have surnames ending in -OV or -EV.

Records