THE PEOPLE'S WORLD CUPS: AN ANALYSIS BASED ON INDICATORS

Abstract

The World Cup is the most prestigious international football tournament and represents an important source of historical and statistical data for evaluating national sporting performance. This study proposes a performance indicator based on the final rankings of national teams in each Men's World Cup from 1930 to 2022. The indicator assigns 20 points to champions, 6 points to runners-up, 3 points to third-place teams, and 1 point to fourth-place teams. The results were aggregated by geographic regions, namely Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia, and Africa. Subsequently, the indicators were normalized by the estimated population of each region, allowing an assessment of relative efficiency in producing elite sporting outcomes.The results show that Europe achieved the highest absolute score, totaling 412 points, followed by Latin America with 237 points. However, after adjusting for population size, the gap between both regions becomes considerably smaller. Latin America demonstrates remarkable sporting efficiency, concentrating ten world titles within a substantially smaller population than Europe. Asia, Africa, and North America display significantly lower performance both in absolute and relative terms. The findings suggest that historical, cultural, institutional, and economic factors may play a substantial role in shaping competitive national football teams beyond demographic size alone.