Summary · Question 8 of 14

National team and long run

The last pages cover the national-team squad, the Big-5 count over three decades and the two comparison countries.

League tier of the 2026 FIFA World Cup squad: England and the peers at the tournament

96 % of England’s 2026 FIFA World Cup squad (25 of 26) played in the 9 top-ranked leagues in 2025/26; the highest share among the 6 peers at the tournament is Germany’s 100 %.

  • Top-9 %
  • Stepping %
  • Domestic %
  • Other %
  • Jordan Pickford
  • Elliot Anderson
  • Dean Henderson
  • Morgan Rogers
  • Declan Rice
  • Ezri Konsa
  • Ollie Watkins
  • Trevoh Chalobah
  • Nico O'Reilly
  • Harry Kane
  • Jarell Quansah
  • Bukayo Saka
  • Dan Burn
  • Djed Spence
  • Reece James
  • Jordan Henderson
  • Jude Bellingham
  • Eberechi Eze
  • Marc Guéhi
  • Anthony Gordon
  • Marcus Rashford
  • Kobbie Mainoo
  • Noni Madueke
  • John Stones
  • James Trafford
  • Ivan Toney
How the peers are sourced
  • Top-9 %
  • Stepping %
  • Domestic %
  • Other %
ENG England Squad 26
96 %
GER Germany Squad 26
100 %
FRA France Squad 26
96 %
ESP Spain Squad 26
96 %
NED Netherlands Squad 26
96 %
BEL Belgium Squad 26
96 %
POR Portugal Squad 26
88 %

How to read it: one tile per squad player, tinted by the tier of the league where he played most minutes in 2025/26; the fold below compares the peers at the same tournament. Tier counts are administrative.

How we know

As an analytics question In numbers: league tier of every 2026 FIFA World Cup squad member's most-minutes 2025/26 row, matched by name and birth year, per country.

What we did We matched every named squad player to his club season and recorded which level of league he was actually playing in.

Sources Wikipedia squad lists (CC BY-SA 4.0, accessed 14 September 2026) matched to 2025/26 league rows on normalised name plus birth year; tier = league of the most-minutes row; squad players without a 2025/26 row, per country: ENG 1, GER 0, FRA 1, ESP 1, NED 1, BEL 1, POR 3.

What this means

25 of the 26 players England took to the 2026 FIFA World Cup played in a top-9 league. The share is a count over one squad, so one player moves it by about 4 percentage points, and the comparison covers only the 6 peers that reached the tournament, not the whole peer set.

What this does not show

Players who were not selected, how the squad played, and whether a player’s league tier reflects his own level or his club’s.

Data snapshot: FBref tables fetched 14 September 2026, snapshot commit ef7dbd4 · code: src/squad_lens.py · status: exploratory, not pre-registered · all limitations