A Birthplace Atlas of the 2026 World Cup

Birthplaces are not biographies, but they do make a curious kind of football atlas. Here's a collection of small maps for the 2026 edition of the World Cup.

How to read it

  • Use the buttons to switch between the birthplace stories and the full people layer.
  • Tap or click points for the player, represented country, and birthplace.
  • Distances are great-circle estimates from GeoJSON coordinates.

Methodology

  • Territories and former states are kept as labelled in the source rather than folded into current sovereign states.
  • “Nearby births, distant flags” uses birthplace distance for the local pair and approximate country-marker distance for the represented countries.
  • The country-size adjusted cluster score uses the squad's maximum distance from its birthplace centre divided by the square root of the represented country's area.