Summary of today's events in sports, 18.11 (Sport1)
No fewer than 137 players, which are 16.4 percent of all footballers in the 2022 World Cup, will represent countries in which they were not born in the World Cup.
This is not a new phenomenon, of course, but a significant increase.
In the 2018 World Cup, for example, 11.1 percent of the players represented teams from countries they were not born in (82 out of 736 players).
The matter is a bit misleading in some cases.
For example Marcus Thuram from the French national team, who was born in Italy while his father, the legendary former footballer Lilian Thuram, was playing there.
Or cases of footballers who came to the country they represent, when they were small children (Rahim Sterling, for example, came from Jamaica to England at the age of 5).
On the other hand, there are of course cases, for example in Qatar, of footballers who received citizenship in order to wear the national uniform.
Or the well-known cases of African national teams calling immigrant sons to the national uniform.
The Englishman of the Polish national team.
Matty Cash (Photo: GettyImages, PressFocus/MB Media)
Morocco is the main responsible for the trend in the World Cup that will start in two days.
No less than 14 of its 26 players were not born in Morocco and most of them have never lived there either.
There are Belgians, Dutch, French, and even one born in Canada - goalkeeper Yassin Bono, although he moved with his family to Morocco at a young age.
Senegal and Tunisia continue the way with 12 players each who were not born in the country, most of them French by heart and birth.
In Qatar there are 10 players from 8 different countries (Algeria, Portugal, Egypt, France, Bahrain, Iraq, Ghana, Sudan) and in Wales there are 9 people born in England.
There will also be countries whose national teams did not reach the World Cup, but their natives actually did.
For example Kosovo, Scotland, Bosnia, Guinea-Bissau, Sweden, Ivory Coast, Honduras and even two Italians (besides the Parma native, Thuram) - one in Poland and the other in...Morocco of course.
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14 of Morocco's 26 players were not born in the country (Photo: GettyImages)
Mexico, Ecuador and Uruguay are represented by footballers born in Argentina, in Japan the goalkeeper Daniel Schmidt was born in the USA to a German father and a Japanese mother, and in Australia there are two born in Kenya and one born in Egypt - all three sons of Sudanese families who escaped the civil war.
37 of these 137 footballers were born in France and 16 in England. Those born in Spain represent Denmark, Serbia, Ecuador, Ghana and Morocco and those born in Germany play in the teams of Switzerland, Croatia, Wales, Cameroon, Senegal and Tunisia.
Only four teams (out of 32) have a full squad of players who were also born in the country: Argentina, Brazil, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.
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Morocco national team
Tunisia national team