The Immigrant Factor — how immigration shapes the tournament

← The Immigrant Factor / World Cup 2026 Champions League LALIGA

⚡ The experiment

The experiment that shows how much of a factor immigration plays on the football’s biggest stage.

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

Metric

Migrant definition

How this edition is calculated

A team's strength is the average rating of its called-up players, taken directly from the FC 26 database (Kaggle) — an objective number that remains relevant forever. When we undo the migration, each player leaving their current team returns to their ancestral nation (replacing its lowest-rated player to keep the squad size at 26). If a player leaves but has no ancestral nation in the Round of 32, they are replaced by a standard replacement-level player (rating 62). Averages are then recalculated — the drop you see is the direct cost of removing migration. Title odds is an optional, illustrative layer calculated via a softmax distribution over the squads' strengths, but average squad strength is the objective, primary metric.

This isn't a study — it's an illustration. The goal was never a perfect forecast.

*Data is updated once a day

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

About the project

Why we made this, the data sources behind every edition, the press coverage and the form to help us improve the formula all live on the project home.

The Immigrant Factor — home →

Other editions: Champions League · LALIGA

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⚡ This week's semifinals

Squad strength, with and without migrants

Metric

Tap any team on the site to see the full breakdown.