Although there is a common belief that more footballers are representing another country than their native ones in recent World Cup editions, a historical overview on migrant footballers representing national teams is lacking. To fill this lacuna, we created a database consisting of 9.400 football players who participated in the FIFA World Cup (1930-2014). In order to count the number of migrant footballers in national teams over time, we critically reflect on the term migrant and the commonly used foreign-born proxy in mainstream migration research. We argue that such a foreign-born approach overlooks historical-geopolitical changes like the redrawing of international boundaries and colonial relationships, and tends to shy away from citizenship complexities, leading to an overestimation of the number of migrant footballers in the database. Therefore, we offer an alternative approach which, through historical contextualization with an emphasis on citizenship, results in more accurate and reliable data on migrant football players. We coin this the contextual-nationality approach.

Although the reliability of the information on Wikipedia-pages can be questioned, we used this source because the data we needed was pretty straightforward and not readily accessible at other, perhaps more trustworthy, online football databases like Transfermarkt.co.uk or Footballdatabase.eu. In case a footballer was foreign-born or (possibly) a migrant, we verified the Wikipedia-data with information from (inter)national newspapers and football magazines. Reliable data on the genealogy of players was often harder to find, as the majority of (grand-) parents are, or were, not internationally famous themselves.The depositor provided the data file in XLSX format. DANS added the ODS format of this file.On April 16th 2018, a small correction was made in the rows related to football player Tony Cascarino.