What football
looks like without
its migrants

We wanted to show, in the language people argue about every single week, what xenophobia would actually cost the game.

So we built a simple scoring game around one number: how good a squad's players are — the average rating across the whole squad, every player available to play.

The deeper and stronger that squad, the better its shot at the title.

Then we run the experiment: we undo the migration. Every migrant leaves the squad that borrowed them, their shirt filled by an ordinary home-grown replacement. In the World Cup edition they don't just disappear — they return to their real national team, the country of their roots, where they take a place ahead of a weaker player. The wealthy leagues that absorbed that talent lose it; teams built on their own diaspora keep their players and even welcome others home. 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 at all.

Each edition explains its own maths at the bottom of its page — the strength calculation, the replacement level, and how the illustrative title odds are derived.