ABOUT

We are obsessed with the beautiful game. It is the most popular sport in the world due to a number of factors, including the massive footprint of British imperial interests and the sheer simplicity of finding joy in kicking a ball. Anyone and everyone can play it, and on every continent in the world, they do.

Few things in this increasingly fractured world are truly universal and beyond written or spoken language. We think the three most important of these rarities are love, music, and football.

When you fall in love with football, you fall hard. There is so much history to explore and so many cup competitions and player transfers to track that it can overtake your life. Being a global sport ensures that somewhere there is a match being played, no matter the hour. And though football is everywhere you look, it is far from homogenous. Every region of the world has put its own stamp on the game, and yet they are all still decidedly the same sport. This is the versatility that is inherent in any idea so simple that it is brilliantly malleable and, at the same time, doggedly unchangeable.

The game contains multitudes and can break your heart as quickly as it won you over. From corruption to politics to bad referees to racist stereotypes, you can sometimes wonder if it’s worth caring so much about something as silly as grown men and women kicking a ball around while wearing matching outfits.

But at the end of the day, it is worth it, and this little atlas is our contribution to the conversation.

For new fans of the game, it offers an easy-to-navigate resource for digesting a mountain of information about stats, nations, cups, and transfer fees. For the seasoned football fanatic, it offers a singular point of entrance into deep dives on the clubs and countries around the world.

CLUBS

We believe the heart of the professional game revolves around the concept of a club that is part of a community. Although this is becoming rarer and rarer—particularly at the highest levels of the game—it is a core tenet of how the English codified and grew the game.

We want to honour that belief by covering every club in the world. We know how insane that sounds, but if we may be so bold as to mention ourselves in the same breath as the Oxford English Dictionary, so does researching, arranging, and publishing a complete volume of every word in the English language. It is our dream that, like the OED, this resource will never be truly complete and will continue to grow and adapt to the needs of football fans around the world.

Having said that, we are for now a very, very small team that can only do so much, so we ask for your patience if the greatest club in the world isn’t represented yet or is woefully under-represented. We know what it means to feel like your club is being slighted, so please bear with us while we feed and train this beautiful beast.

Drop us a line with ideas, resources, comments, or financial donations. All will help tremendously.

Tribalism can be the greatest and the worst thing about football, but first and foremost we want the tribe of football fans to be united. We all have enough battles to fight in the world outside of our cherished game.

THE CLUB PLAN

We are starting with the 5 leagues largely considered to be the best in the world. The revenue generated and the talent on display in these leagues prove their efficacy time and time again. However, we understand if you think Liga MX or the Dutch Eredivisie are the only leagues worth following. We will get there, we promise. And also, referring to the aforementioned “drop us a line” statement, squeaky wheels do tend to get oiled sooner than the quiet ones.

THE NATION PLAN

The FIFA World Cup and all that goes into it will follow the same trajectory. Meaning, the most successful countries will be created and uploaded first. Just like the clubs, though, we want every country that has ever qualified for a world FIFA ranking to be represented.

THE COMMUNITY PLAN

The idea for the atlas came from being in a foreign country and trying to find pick-up games to play in. This initial spark is what will bring home the final phase of the World Football Atlas.

This first phase of the atlas, where you can find your professional club and national team, is the SUPPORT section. The next phases are PLAY, TRAIN, and TEACH. These will be parts of the atlas that are a resource for everything from finding the right local academy for your son or daughter to play in to the best places to get your coaching license or where to buy equipment for your 5-a-side Sunday team.

The possibilities are endless, and the game is only growing, so right now we have to get back to work. We’d like to thank you from the bottom of our heart for being here and hope you enjoy all of this as much as we enjoy creating it.

See you on the pitch!

NOTES

ASSISTS
You many have noticed some very low numbers in each club’s all-time assist leader category. This is because things like Wins, Goals, and Appearances have been kept track of since the late 19th century and/or are easy to figure out from a little bit of research. The main reason for this is that assists aren’t a part of the official rules of the game so it seems that no one ever really thought to keep track of them until some time in the 1980s. Although the original North American Soccer League kept assist stats starting back in 1968 so maybe it’s a North American thing. A point that may be proven by the fact that basketball and ice hockey were already counting assists. We’ve included them because they are considered a huge part of the modern game and they provide a great metric for measuring the effectiveness of a play-maker.

Here’s some information on the history of recording an assist as a stat: Assist (association football)

Ange Postecoglu certainly doesn’t like them!

CUPS
Cup competitions are seemingly everywhere these days. You’ll find no shortage of debate over the merits of things like the the Carabao EFL Cup in England. It used to be called the League Cup before a corporate sponsor got its hands on the naming rights but even then it was seen as tertiary to winning the league and the FA Cup, in that order.

Most leagues also have “Super Cups,” whereby the champion of the league and the champion of the major domestic cup from the previous season play a match a week or so before the new season starts.