🌍 The Week in International Sport
Monday July 20th: the FIFA World Cup, age-grade men's rugby and Kathy Garcia
This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.
In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:
🇪🇸 Spain winning a world title in men’s soccer
📊 Chart of the week: assessing South Africa’s level in age-grade rugby union
⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kathy Garcia’s pick and shovel
💭 A few other interesting things I learned
As a reminder: the team ratings used in this newsletter are on a zero-to-10 scale, and are calculated based on a nation’s performance in competitive fixtures in a given sport since the start of the 2022 calendar year. (For more detail, click here.)
🇪🇸 Spain win the 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup
The ‘experts’ had a pretty good FIFA World Cup. When I reviewed predictions made by the DTAI Sports Analytics Lab at KU Leuven at the outset of this edition, they had Spain, Argentina, France and England as the four most likely teams to win outright.
Those four nations were ultimately the four semi-finalists. While I wouldn’t yet rely on my basic rating system to predict match outcomes in any sport, I was pleased to see that yesterday’s two finalists — Argentina (7.7) and Spain (7.2) — were the top two teams in my first set of men’s soccer rankings, too. After a dominant performance and an eventual 1-0 win in extra time, Spain have become the first nation ever to hold both the men’s and the women’s FIFA World Cup titles simultaneously.
Along with Portugal, they are one of only two countries to have a rated team in all six versions of the game that I’m tracking for this project: both the men’s and women’s versions of the 11-a-side outdoor sport, as well as futsal and beach soccer. All six Spanish teams have a current rating of at least six out of 10 — and five are ranked inside the top four of their sport. (Men’s beach soccer — eighth — is the outlier.) No other country has a stronger active claim to be the ‘home of soccer’ than Spain.
📊 Chart of the week: Are South Africa unstoppable in age-grade rugby?
They didn’t top the first rankings I published last week, but South Africa would make a strong case that they’re the current home of men’s rugby union. To go with World Cup titles in 2019 and 2023, they’ve also had a lot of success at age-grade level.
On Saturday — while one of their top eligible players made his senior debut for the Springboks — their U20 side won a second consecutive Junior World Championship final. Can the rest of the world keep up? Actually, it’s not quite that simple. As I’ve written about men’s rugby union and rugby sevens this year, I’ve often highlighted how much more competitive these codes have become. It’s true at this level, too: weaker nations have eroded much of the margin that used to separate top U20 teams.
The chart above splits the history of the U20 JWC into two periods. From its launch in 2008 until 2019, team strength was highly variable: two top-tier nations — New Zealand and South Africa — scored more than 60% of the points in their matches, while two others had a point share below 40%. However, since restarting after a multi-year break in 2023, the competition has become much more tightly contested: over the last four editions, every elite nation is between 40% and 60% by this metric.
⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kathy Garcia’s pick and shovel
Some of the highlights I’ve featured in this section recently haven’t been particularly subtle ones. In this edition, though, my favourite play is one that became even more impressive the more I watched it closely.
Last week, Puerto Rico were competing in the group stages of the women’s softball World Cup. In their final game against Japan, infielder Kathy Garcia completed an out by collecting a hard-hit ground ball and transferring it to her teammate covering second base. After taking the ball on the first bounce at full stretch, Garcia doesn’t bother shifting it back to her stronger side to make a throw. From her knees, she uses her glove to shovel the ball the last few feet and beat the runner on first by a second.
You can watch a replay of this play on Instagram here.
💭 What else I learned last week
For ESPN, Jeff Passan reported on negotiations between LA28 officials, Major League Baseball and the league’s Players Association regarding the participation of top men’s talent in the next edition of the Olympic Games. Several players have publicly stated their interest, but off-field questions remain unresolved. A union adviser said: “the MLBPA is seeking fair treatment for its members in consideration for the substantial financial value they would bring to LA28.”
For Cricinfo, S Sudarshanan contextualised India’s win over England in the one-off women’s test match at Lord’s last week. Because of a domestic calendar that reserves some time for red-ball cricket, many of the away side’s players — unlike the hosts’ — had considerable experience in the longer format of the game. After the match, England batter Heather Knight called for her own board to follow suit and provide more opportunities to develop test skills below international level.
For Sky Sports, Adam Bate analysed the performance of Spain’s 19-year-old central defender Pau Cubarsí at this year’s men’s soccer World Cup. Along with teammate Lamine Yamal, he is one of just six teenagers in the tournament’s history to have started the final and ended up on the winning side. Cubarsí’s ability on the ball is already exceptional, but he was also part of a defensive unit that conceded only one goal in their eight games over the last five weeks.
The next edition of the newsletter will be published on Monday July 27th.
