Where the World Cup grew up

Each of these 518 documents is the childhood-and-family section of one footballer named to a 2026 World Cup squad, with the trophies and transfer fees stripped out. They divide first on how a beginning even gets told: as a climb through youth clubs, school teams and academies, or as an account of who a player's parents are and where they came from.

Where the World Cup Grew Up

Before he was one of Canada's best players, Alphonso Davies was a small boy in Buduburam, a refugee camp in Ghana where his parents had landed after fleeing Liberia's civil war — one family among the more than 450,000 the fighting displaced. They reached Edmonton in 2005. At fourteen he packed a bag and moved alone across the country to Vancouver to chase the game. It is an astonishing way to arrive at a World Cup, and also, in its bones, an ordinary one: a kid, a ball, and a long way to go.

We went looking for those beginnings. For every one of the 1,248 players named to a 2026 squad we pulled the "early life" and "personal life" sections of their Wikipedia [[document|page]] — in whatever language told the story best — set the trophies and the transfer fees aside, and read the 518 — about four in ten — who had a real childhood on the record as a single population. We wanted the part the box scores leave out: not who pays these players, but who raised them, and where.

Read together, the players divide first on something quieter than rich or poor. They divide on how a beginning even gets told. For some it reads like a résumé. Weston McKennie was an Air Force kid, born at Fort Lewis, who learned the game near Ramstein in Germany while his father was stationed there, then came home to seven years in the FC Dallas youth system — a clean ladder of clubs and academies, rung by rung. For others, the beginning is a lineage. Amine Gouiri's page barely mentions a club before it tells you he was born in Bourgoin-Jallieu to a family from Béjaïa and Sétif — an origin that answers the question where are your parents from before it answers which team. A path you walked, or roots you carry.

Down the lineage side, the stories get specific, and large. One of the biggest groups on the whole [[map]] is French-born sons of immigrants — the pattern behind a Mbappé or a Dembélé, France quietly turning the children of arrivals into a national team. Cédric Bakambu, born in France to Congolese parents, says it without apology: "I grew up with both cultures and I am very proud of that. I think it's something that enriches you." Some carry a border through the family — Ricardo Pepi, raised in El Paso and forever slipping across to Ciudad Juárez to see relatives. Some carry a whole war, in the families displaced out of the former Yugoslavia. And a few carry a loss they never set down: Rodrigo Bentancur was four when his mother died, and he has worn the number 30 ever since, for her birthday.

Not every childhood here is hardship — many are simply the universal one. Anass Salah-Eddine grew up in a Moroccan family in Amsterdam's Osdorp, and the way his page remembers it, after school he would drop his bag, eat fast, and run back out to the pleintjes, the little neighborhood courts, until it got dark. That boy is on nearly every page in this collection, in a hundred cities. The [[map]] also sorts the players by footballing dynasty (Giuliano Simeone, born in Rome while his father played for Lazio, now coached by that same father), by the dual nationalities a grandparent leaves behind, and by quieter markers of identity and faith. Those last are our readings of what the pages say — a player sits where the words of their biography put them, not where we would place them.

And then there is the silence. More than half of the 1,248 have no childhood on the page at all, and the gap runs by region. Reading every language closed some of it — French biographies hold the early years of many African players that English skips right past — but it did not close it: a European or West-African player is far likelier to have a written childhood than a Gulf or East-Asian one. The map can only hold the players whose beginnings someone thought worth writing down. The boys on all the other pleintjes, the ones no one recorded, are the part of this picture you cannot see — and maybe the truest thing it has to say.