Own Goal

The calculator that shows how xenophobia can hurt the world (cup).

Title odds built from squad strength — the average rating of each nation's eleven — 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.

⚡ The experiment

Take a team's migrant players off the pitch and watch its title odds collapse. This switch is the whole point of Own Goal.

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Migrant definition

Migrants in the jersey of their roots

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 of its starting eleven. The stronger the eleven, the better its shot at the title.

Then we run the experiment. Take a team's migrant players off the pitch and give it back an ordinary, average squad member in their place — because the migrants are usually the ones in the eleven, raising the level. The average slips, and the title odds slip with it. Teams built at home don't budge; teams built on migration fall. 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.

On the data: ratings come from EA FC 26 matched to the official 2026 squads; the migrant flag is hand-verified for the decisive teams (green) and the ones confirmed 100% home-grown (blue). Where a squad's origins aren't fully verified (gray), it stays in the ranking but nobody is removed — we don't invent people. Sources: USA TODAY, bet365, Foreign Policy.

A project by Artur Scartazzini and Diego Vieira — migrants. 🌍