How France Sneaked 9 Teams into the World Cup

There are 99 players born in France in the 2026 World Cup. Each national team can name a squad of only 26 players. This means that 73 players representing other national teams were actually born in France. In other words, there are nearly four full squads' worth of French-born players at the 2026 World Cup.

There are 1,248 players participating in the 2026 World Cup in total, and you can view the birthplaces of all 1,248 on FC Maps.

The map includes a number of filtering options that allow you to browse players by national team, club, competition, position, or country of birth. FC Maps draws on data from sources including Wikipedia and Transfermarkt, with birth locations geocoded using OpenStreetMap and supplemented by manual verification.

France isn't the only country producing excess talent for the global game. There are 50 players born in Germany at this World Cup, meaning that alongside the four squads’ worth of French-born players, there are nearly two full squads’ worth of German-born players in the tournament. In fact just under 1 in every 8 players participating in this World Cup was born in either France or Germany.

If we stretch this conceit a little and consider that each team can field only 11 players at one time, then France has nine full teams’ worth of players in the World Cup, and Germany has around four and a half teams’ worth.