The Immigrant Factor — how immigration shapes the World Cup

⚡ National team odds

The experiment that shows how much of a factor immigration plays on the World Cup.

Title odds built from squad strength — the average rating across each nation's whole called-up squad — then what happens when a team can't count on its migrant players. The 32 teams of the Round of 32. Tap any team for the breakdown.

Migrant definition

Why we made this

We wanted to show, in the language everyone argues about every four years, what xenophobia would actually cost the World Cup. So we built a simple scoring game around one number: how good a nation's players are — the average rating across its whole called-up squad, every player it brought to the tournament. The deeper and stronger that squad, the better its shot at the title.

Then we run the experiment: we undo the migration. Every migrant leaves the squad that borrowed them — their shirt filled by an ordinary home-grown replacement — and returns to their real national team, the country of their roots, where they take a place ahead of a weaker player. Second-generation stars go back to their ancestral nations; the wealthy leagues that absorbed that talent lose it, while teams built on their own diaspora keep their players and even welcome others home. The gap you see is the point.

This isn't a study — it's an illustration. The goal was never a perfect forecast. It's to make one idea impossible to ignore: the players a country might call a "foreign influence" are often the reason it can dream of the biggest stage sport has between nations at all.

How the calculation works: A team's base strength is the average of its 26 players' ratings (obtained from FC 26 data). Title odds are distributed among the teams using a mathematical formula (softmax) based on these averages, so they all sum to 100%. When we remove migrants, each leaving player is replaced by a default replacement player (rating 62). If a departing player has documented roots in another Round-of-32 nation, they join that squad, replacing its lowest-rated player to maintain the 26-player limit. The averages and title odds are then fully recalculated.

Data sources

The player ratings and squad lists are based on the following datasets:

Player ratings:
FC 26 Player Data (Kaggle) ↗ — players.csv file

Squad line-ups:
FIFA World Cup 2026 Dataset (Kaggle) ↗ — squads_and_players.csv file

*Data is updated once a day

A project by Artur Scartazzini, Diego Vieira and Felipe Libano, with love and support of R/GA. 🌍

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