FIFA World Cup 2026

As a Malaysian I could be very much an outsider to FIFA World Cup given that my country has never qualified. However, when I found out Kastaneer of Curacao is currently playing for Terengganu, Malaysia, I could not help checking out if there are more players playing in Southeast Asia where I have come from. Interestingly, I found Al-Rawabdeh of Jordan also plays in Malaysia and there are players playing in Thailand and Indonesia. It seems quite a large number of countries in the world do 'take part' in the World Cup in one way or another, beyond being the spectators. This also shows how connected we are to each other around the world.

Players playing professionally in countries other than the countries they represent, is in fact reflecting human movement, simply put migration, across the world in general. In the same vein, they do not necessarily represent the countries where they were born. They could be choosing to represent countries through ancestry, which is also the legacy of migration. All these choices -- where to pursue professional careers, build family and express identity at a world stage, are down to personal as well as external circumstances. These are also choices facing us, whether you move out or stay in your country of birth. Therefore, I see World Cup players as a mirror to general migration. With this in mind while looking at the World Cup Team composition, it is undeniably that each player may have brought with them to the national team different experiences given all these movements and choices.

To illustrate the migration patterns as reflected by world cup players and the mix of experiences in each team, I put together all 48 World Cup teams in the dashboard below, with each circle corresponding to one player, and colour of the circles indicating the selected variable, and you could toggle between variables. The default is where they play professionally. You could also hover over each circle to get a pop up with more details about the player and double click on the circle to be shown the wikipedia page of the player. The legend panel on the left shows the total number of players with the characteristics corresponding to the variable. The panel on the right is my observation.

To pique your interest, the overall number of players playing locally and number of players born local is totally opposite. There are only 343 players playing locally, and 906 players playing elsewhere, while 940 players born local,and 309 are foreign-born. Feel free to explore the visualisation to look into details and form your own opinions and analysis!

Admittedly, this is a simplified views of national team compositions, because there are other factors that I did not include, such as their ancestry data and previous professional football clubs.

Given the constraint of my technical skills, this dashboard is best viewed with on laptops or desktops with screen resolution at least 1080p rather than small screen devices.