The first time that the Haitian men’s national soccer team played in the FIFA World Cup, in 1974, it was composed entirely of homegrown players: All 22 people on the roster were born in Haiti, and all but one represented local clubs.
More than 50 years later, 16 of the 26 players who took the field for their first game against Scotland on June 13 were born outside of Haiti, and most play for clubs in North America and Europe. These players are mostly eligible for the team through Haitian ancestry. Only one player, Woodensky Pierre, is based in the country. The national team’s head coach, Sébastien Migné of France, has never set foot in Haiti, even as he leads the squad in its second-ever World Cup appearance.
Haiti’s reliance on foreign-born talent is a by-product of conditions that have driven many people to leave the country: economic instability, political turmoil, and pervasive insecurity. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, gang-related violence has made it virtually impossible for the national team to host matches at home; Haiti played its home World Cup qualifiers in Curaçao and has trained in Florida and New Jersey.
But Haiti’s roster is far from unique. At this year’s World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, many teams depend on players born outside the country that they represent. This trend has accelerated since the 1980s, reflecting the growing influence of migration on the composition of World Cup teams and the increasingly transnational nature of the sport.
In 2004, FIFA tightened its eligibility rules to require that players have a “clear connection” to the country that they represent after Qatar’s soccer association offered financial incentives to naturalize players with no prior connection to the country. Today, an individual can play for a national team if they hold permanent nationality, whether acquired by birth or naturalization; in the latter case, FIFA requires a direct connection through birth, parental or grandparental ancestry, or at least five years of continuous residency. By restricting opportunistic naturalizations while codifying ancestry and heritage as a legitimate pathway, these changes helped shape the diaspora-heavy squads seen at this year’s tournament.
The World Cup has always featured foreign-born players on national teams, though their prevalence has varied over time, likely reflecting migration patterns and the globalization of professional soccer. At the inaugural tournament in 1930, which featured just 13 teams, a little more than 5 percent of all players represented a country other than that of their birth, according to a 2022 analysis by Vox. By the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, in which 32 teams participated, that figure had risen to 16.5 percent.
That year, Morocco led the charge, with nearly 54 percent of its players born outside the country. Tunisia and Senegal also fielded significant numbers of players born abroad, primarily in France.
The share of foreign-born players at the World Cup has risen markedly this year, to 23.2 percent. One major reason for this increase is that the tournament now features a record 48 teams. This expansion allowed more countries with transnational player pools to qualify.
At the same time, national federations increasingly look beyond their borders to assemble the strongest rosters. Countries with small populations must tap into diaspora networks. Curaçao is perhaps the starkest example. With a population of roughly 156,000, it is the smallest nation to ever qualify for the World Cup. Its 26-member squad is composed almost entirely of foreign-born talent: All but one of the players were born in the Netherlands, a legacy of nearly 400 years of Dutch colonial rule.
Several other qualifiers rely heavily on foreign-born players, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (76.9 percent), Morocco (73.1 percent), Algeria (61.5 percent), Bosnia and Herzegovina (57.7 percent), and Tunisia (57.7 percent). At the other end of the spectrum are teams with no foreign-born representation, including Austria, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa.
Many of the foreign-born players at the 2026 World Cup share a common country of origin: France. Across all 48 teams, 99 players were born in France—including 54 in Greater Paris alone. This cements the French capital’s long-standing reputation as the world’s most prolific region for developing soccer talent. By comparison, Greater London sent 14 players to this year’s tournament.
A handful of clubs have effectively become the infrastructure supporting the world’s best soccer, with a few European academies supplying players for the World Cup who hail from many countries.
Players who spent time in Manchester City’s youth system appear for 10 different national teams; the Manchester United and Arsenal academies each trained players representing eight teams; Paris Saint-Germain’s system, seven teams; and Bayern Munich’s, five teams. Ajax, the Amsterdam club renowned for elite player development, has more alumni at this year’s tournament than any other academy: 17, across five national teams.
While this year’s World Cup is the most truly global to date, it also has increasing barriers to international mobility. The United States—which will host 78 matches, three-quarters of the tournament’s total—has tightened immigration and travel policies under President Donald Trump.
For a small group of nations, supporters are effectively shut out from traveling to the United States. Haiti and Iran are subject to full U.S. travel bans that bar almost all of their nationals from obtaining both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas. The bans carve out an exception for players and essential staff. Two more qualifiers, Senegal and Ivory Coast, were added to a partial ban list in December that suspended new tourist visas; fans who did not already hold a U.S. visa as of Jan. 1 cannot obtain one now.
These restrictions have wide-ranging impact. At least 15 Iranian officials were denied U.S. visas, while Iran’s soccer federation said FIFA revoked its ability to allocate tickets to U.S. games for its fans—something that all participating federations can do. Omar Artan, set to be the first Somali referee to officiate at a World Cup, was denied entry to the United States after being detained at a Miami airport due to alleged “association with suspected members of terror organizations.” Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was held for almost seven hours of questioning upon his arrival in Chicago.
The toughest U.S. restrictions tend to land on countries whose teams were built largely on foreign-born talent. The overlap is not coincidental: The instability and lack of opportunity that tend to scatter a country’s soccer talent beyond its borders make its fans a perceived higher risk to admit. Any accommodations are narrow by design—as they attach to the World Cup ticket, not the traveler, and expire with the tournament.
Five qualifying countries—Algeria, Cape Verde, Tunisia, Senegal, and Ivory Coast—are on the U.S. visa-bond list, requiring their nationals, excluding players, to post refundable deposits of $5,000 to $15,000 for a tourist visa. The Trump administration announced only last month that it would waive the bond requirement for fans who had purchased tickets for U.S.-based matches as of mid-April and enrolled in FIFA Pass. The waiver is meaningful only for Algerian, Cape Verdean, and Tunisian supporters. For Senegal and Ivory Coast, it offers no relief, as their partial travel ban has already suspended the tourist visas that the bond would otherwise apply to.
The tournament’s other hosts offer little relief. Canada requires visitor visas from these same African and Middle Eastern fanbases (as well as those from a list of other countries), which are no easier to obtain than a U.S. visa. Mexico does not require a visa for travelers who already hold a valid U.S. visa—or a Canadian, British, Japanese, or Schengen Zone one. But a fan barred from the United States, as Haitians and Iranians are, must likely apply to Mexico directly.
Tunisia plays two of its three group matches in Mexico, and Senegal and Ivory Coast play one each in Canada—but a visa wall stands at every gate. This is a departure from previous tournaments, when host countries lowered barriers to entry for fans. In 2018, Russia granted visa-free entry to all ticket holders who received a “fan ID” from the government. Qatar did the same in 2022, allowing fans to enter the country for the duration of the tournament without a traditional visa.
The result is a tournament whose teams are more international than ever but whose stands will remain largely unchanged. The expansion to 48 teams brought in several nations whose squads were assembled from their diasporas; many of the fans who will be able to cheer on the countries facing the biggest visa barriers will come from diaspora communities as well.
These patterns were apparent on June 16, when France faced Senegal in New Jersey. The two teams reflect different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Many of the players on France’s roster are the French-born children of immigrants, while Senegal’s foreign-born players are members of the African diaspora who came up through French clubs.
Only three of France’s 26 players were born abroad, and 88.5 percent of the team has spent the bulk of their senior careers in France. Senegal’s roster, by contrast, is nearly half foreign-born, with 10 of these 12 players born in France. Nearly three-quarters of the Senegalese players have played senior football in France.
National teams are sometimes seen as a country’s idealized self-image. But the 2026 World Cup rosters seem to reflect nations as they exist: shaped by those who stayed, those who left, and the children of both—gathered, for one summer, on the game’s biggest stage.
—Infographics by Lori Kelley, executive creative director
