footballers

Unless you are a real data and statistics machine, when asked about Which country produces the most elite footballers? Surely most of us would answer that Brazil, a country that has had five World Cups and is also a true exporter of talent with the ball at its feet. But not. Although the answer differs depending on the time frame you choose, there is one place in the world that has taken the world by storm in the last century: Uruguay. Uruguay has barely 3.5 million inhabitants, a figure similar to that of Madrid or Berlin, and despite being a small country, it has two World Cups, two Olympic medals and 15 Copa América to its credit. And an incredible reality: Uruguay is, per capita, the country that has produced the most famous soccer players in the entire history of soccer. Below these lines we attach a screenshot of the data project “The Atlas“, an interactive visualization that calculates, for each country, how many top (male) soccer players in the world by historical popularity there are per million inhabitants. We highly recommend playing around, since you can sift through countries, regions, number of soccer players and years. It doesn’t matter what you choose because Uruguay almost always wins. The data is devastating: Uruguay produces 11.3 elite football figures per million inhabitantsa very long way from the second, Croatia, which has 4.81. Third and fourth are the Netherlands (4.58 figures per million inhabitants) and Argentina (3.82). If you move the time bar to the year 1999, Spain takes over the gold in a timely manner. Uruguay produces more famous footballers per capita than any country in the world. The Atlas This interactive graph is the work of Argentine economist Daniel Schteingart and for its preparation he used two sources: on the one hand Pantheon from the MIT Media Lab, which measures the historical fame of each footballer according to their presence on Wikipedia and on the other, population data from Our World in Data, which allows us to calculate how many famous figures each country produces per inhabitant. However, the fact that Uruguay is an absolute winner is something that has also been documented The Observer with data from the CIES Football Observatory and RT. Three different analyzes with different methodologies and the same result: Uruguay wins by a landslide. The country that produces the most famous soccer players in the world is not Brazil or France The question is clear: what Uruguay that does not have the rest. According to ESPN Deportesthe key is in training: Uruguay has 28 professional clubs that train young people. For Argentina or Brazil to have that same proportion per inhabitant, they would need 336 and 1,624 clubs respectively, well above what they currently have, 103 and 168, respectively. This exhaustive commitment to young talent allows the Latin American country to detect and exploit that potential that would perhaps go unnoticed in other larger countries. The author of the chart explains There is also another reality that gives South American countries an advantage: “there is almost no competition from other sports for young talent. Here everyone wants to be a soccer player, while in Europe and the United States talent is distributed among several disciplines.” Of course, regarding the future he has a warning: “The technicalization and globalization of football may favor rich countries, but as long as South American footballers continue to return to their national teams, the tradition will continue.” The limitations of the graph are those of its bases: the graph indicator measures fame on Wikipedia, which does not necessarily imply measuring football quality objectively, which favors more recent players or those who are very popular and plays to the detriment of veteran stars, with a smaller footprint on the internet. In Xataka | We still don’t know who will win the 2026 World Cup, but we do know who is left without sleep: the devastating graphic of FIFA schedules In Xataka | 24 years ago Oliver Kahn sued EA and won. Then a new goalkeeper appeared in football games: Jens Mustermann