Let’s start this week’s newsletter by acknowledging something: We promised that we wouldn’t write that much about the FIFA World Cup a few weeks ago and, yet, have done so almost exclusively since making that proclamation. While this may feel like we have violated your trust, it is our belief at OSA HQ that, while we don’t necessarily agree with the premise of the accusation, we feel like we have a damn good reason for doing something like that, if that in fact did happen. That excuse is that the 2026 edition of the tournament has been exceptionally great, among the best ones ever, and that’s even with Argentina and Spain making it to the final.

The journey to Sunday’s final match has had essentially everything. From recording breaking scoring performances to transcendent work by goalies from all over the world, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thierry Henry attempting to behead Alexi Lalas on an almost daily basis, the English English-ing harder than they have since the end of the Victorian age (or the 1986 final, depending on who you ask) and even a dance hit based on a ref’s red card announcement.

All of this is in addition to the excitement that comes with several totally new teams — and a bunch more that hadn’t been there in decades, like DR Congo, Scotland and Norway — making their way into the tournament accompanied by passionate fanbases that remind us why all sports are good sports. Most importantly, for our purposes at least, is that this year’s edition has led to the opening of floodgates to obscure soccer leagues¹which have found themselves represented in unprecedented ways on the biggest stage not just in their sport, but the entirety of the sports-industrial complex.

This year’s move to 48 teams² and those squads’ 1248 players have come from leagues in a record-shattering³ 72 different countries. And it’s not just the 48 countries in the tournament plus a couple of low-rent stragglers, like Italy, that have made up those numbers.

Of the 10 countries — Kazakhstan, Ireland, Malaysia, Armenia, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Jordan, Venezuela and Azerbaijan — sending players from their domestic leagues to the World Cup for the first time, only two (Jordan and Uzbekistan) qualified to actually play. And, on the flip side, seven of the nations (Cape Verde, Croatia, Curaçao, DR Congo, Cote D’Ivorie, Senegal and Uruguay) who did field teams did so with entire rosters of “exported” players (and, in several of those cases, had many players who are part of their respective diasporic communities as opposed to living in the countries themselves).

Though, while it’s definitely neat that the Azerbaijan Premier League’s own Turan Tovuz club managed to get someone in a World Cup⁴, the expansion of the game to the most obscure and farthest reaches of the globe has been largely underwritten by a movement towards exporting talent as the primary means of player development in most countries (in this specific case, Panama). It’s a schism that has steadily grown apace since the mid 90s (for reasons we’ll get into in a little bit) and this year’s World Cup has served as a kind of punctuated equilibrium in that evolutionary process, for better and worse.

Better because, of course a guy from Panama ending up playing professional football in Azerbaijan’s top flight is objectively cool, especially if it’s as part of a club that represents a village with 12,000 people. Worse because the numbers of exoduses involved also speaks to a collective “brain drain” of talent in a lot of countries that we are seeing represented every four years.

And the level to which this used to not be the case is kind of mind-boggling, especially during first phase of the FIFA World Cup that took place between 1930 and 1978 where 13-16 teams competed each time. As you can see in the chart below, which has the percentage of players who played in the domestic leagues of their national squad (English players playing in the then-”First Division” atop the English football pyramid, et al.) on top in red and the percentage of teams who had even a single player playing outside of their domestic system at the time they were named to the team in black.

And while 39% of teams having even one player who did not play domestically may seem like it would involve a lot of players, the chart below provides a visual representation of just how few individuals that actually involved. Each team is broken down by the percentage of players on their rosters that play in their domestic leagues. The lower the dot (which is color-coded to match their confederation,) the smaller the percentage of players on their squad who play professionally in their country.

While some teams exported some of their players, the overwhelming norm was to create a roster composed entirely, or as close as was possible, of literally homegrown talent. The nations and teams that didn’t adhere to this standard were almost exclusively those under the imperial control/Home Rule, like Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as you can see in these charts focused on the 1954 and 1958 editions.

In general, the only country during this period that consistently exported anything beyond a negligible number of their best players to other parts of the world⁵ was Sweden.

And even with the Swedes, it wasn’t until their fourth appearance in the 1958 that they had the audacity to field any players that didn’t play in the Fotbollsallsvenskan, when they put five players who primarily played in Italian leagues on their roster. For Sweden, it was a trend — just the exporting, not the Italian part, per se, as Swedish players began finding themselves in Switzerland and (West) Germany, among other places — that continued after a 12-year hiatus between appearances, but one that did not set the football world on fire.

The next phase of the tournament — between 1982 and 1994, where 24 teams qualified for each edition — did, however, mark a somewhat noticeable shift in the adherence to sticking to players who solely play on your soil, as starting in 1986, the percentage of players who made their money playing football domestically dropped below the percentage of teams who put teams out comprised entirely of those kinds of players (a trend which very much continues to this day).

For the keen observers of charts who read this newsletter, the tailend of those diverging trend lines above is probably particularly interesting (or at least it was to me). And while you may be thinking that has something with that being the year the US hosted the tournament for the first time — which did signify that level to which soccer had taken over most of the world outside of our borders as almost every other country’s most popular sport — it’s actually almost certainly because that was the first time a tournament was held after the founding of the Premier League, which is one of the two most important parts of how we got to where we are now.

The Premier League, which started after the aforementioned First Division of England decided to break off from the rest of the English Football League (which is now better known as the Championship, League One and League Two) in 1992 was a massive shift not just in how players were compensated, but how the leagues themselves were governed. Spearheaded by the top 22 teams in the English system, all looking to maximize earnings through collective bargaining on rights feeds, the establishment of the Premier League moved the focus of top-tier leagues in every country (particularly throughout Europe) from building the game within the country while also running profitable business to maximizing the profits on an international scale.

Along with that change, the move from 24-teams qualifying for the World Cup finals to 32 starting with the 1998 edition hosted by France, led to what has essentially been an inversion of the make up of teams over the last seven stagings of the tournament from the first ten, including three years (2002, 2014 and 2022) where every single team had at least one player who did not play in their domestic league.

Which is fairly remarkable in and of itself, is presumably something worth celebrating, especially for awful cosmopolitans like ourselves. Unfortunately, while it’s not something that’s been necessarily terrible for everyone involved, the shift from an entirely domesticated squad-building structure to one that focuses every increasingly on globalization is one that has had the same effect in soccer as it has had in nearly every other industry it touches: an unsustainable concentration of power by people who already had the most.

Now, the Premier League, and English leagues in general, definitely haven’t reached “Elon Musk” levels of consolidation in terms of power, money or “doing racisms”. But this kind of concentration is certainly not without consequence. For football, it means that the seven nation⁶ tally of teams that did not have a single player representing their domestic leagues on their rosters is a number that will almost certainly go up, despite being nearly double the most ever in a single tournament⁷.

And it won’t be countries like Italy who are affected, despite their national team being unable to qualify the last three times they tried. Nor will it be, per se, places like Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan. Instead, the drain will continue among mid-tier leagues like those in the Scandinavian, sub-Saharan Africa and former Soviet regions of the world, as their significant success mixed with weakened or, in some cases, almost non-existent domestic structures will make them targets for larger clubs and leagues to poach their best players.

Because just as much as the World Cup giveth, it also taketh away. In this case, much like the transfer portal and NIL money has made it harder for mid-major colleges to thrive in revenue sports, opportunities for players developed in the highest tiers of domestic leagues to stay there for any extended period of time has dropped, pushing more and more players into reserve roles on teams able to pay more but not provide the same amount of playing time (and, importantly at least from an aesthetic perspective, distinct stylistic differences).

As you may have guessed, there’s about a thousand numbers, graphs and charts that I could show you to underscore just how significant a change this concentration of power has been over the last ten years. But, instead, I’ll leave you with the number that, to me, best exemplifies just how out of whack things have gotten in the world of soccer, obscure or otherwise:

While England had by far the most players coming from their leagues at this year’s World Cup (with 199 to Germany’s 110,) even if you only counted those players in the lower tiers of English soccer⁸, that group by itself represented the ninth most players (42) from domestic leagues of any other nation in the entire World Cup, including more than double that of the team who just beat them last night, Argentina.

Which begets the question: Have the English considered sending their best players to Buenos Aires, as that seems to be working way better than whatever else they’ve been doing.

We have spoken about pesäpallo somewhat briefly around these parts, but for those who are unaware, it is a bat-and-ball sport that doubles as Finland’s national pastime (for all intents and purposes, at least) and is essentially a mix between t-ball and one of those professional tag competitions. And, over the past week, at one of its most famous playing fields (calling it a stadium seems like a bit much, tbh), a day a lot of us dreamed of has finally happened: after a struck ball managed to find its way into the moat-like river surrounding the stadium — where it remains in play — an errant throw to … third?…base led to what is essentially an unprecedented double river ball.

We truly live in an age of wonder, even if it’s hard to find sometimes.