How migration has shaped the World Cup

The 2022 Qatar World Cup has the highest share of foreign-born players in the event’s history. We collected the data on over 800 foreign players throughout the history of the World Cup from 1930 to 2022 to show that migration has shaped the World Cup since the very beginning. The story also explains how players come to represent countries other than their birthplaces overtime and the role of FIFA in the nationalization of the sport.

We asked readers to guess the number of foreign born players at the 2022 World Cup based on previous years’ figures:

A breakdown of how foreign-born players of the teams at The World Cup got their citizenship: