Shortest and Tallest Teams in the 2022 World Cup

With the 2022 World Cup underway, we take a look at each squad participating in Qatar over the next month, as we try to find the shortest and the tallest teams competing. 

In the article you can see the key findings and the complete dataset is linked under the methodology section. 

Shortest Team in the 2022 World Cup – Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has the shortest team participating in the World Cup with an average height of 178.7 cm, even though they don’t have a single player in the top five shortest players. It hasn’t impacted their chances of making a sizeable statement at this year’s World Cup though, as they’ve already beaten Argentina 2-1, having previously fallen behind through a Lionel Messi penalty. 

Spain is the tenth shortest team participating in the World Cup with an average height of 181.1 cm and they also don’t have a player in the top five shortest players, but again, that hasn’t impacted their chances of winning games, as they thrashed Costa Rica 7-0 in their first match of the tournament. 

Spain are also the only team in the top five shortest teams that is based in Europe, while South America is the highest represented continent on the list. 

Tallest Team in the 2022 World Cup – Serbia 

Serbia is the tallest team participating in the World Cup with an average height of 187 cm. Serbia also has the second tallest player in the World Cup. Their goalkeeper, Vanja Milinkovic-Savic, is 202 cm which of course has a huge impact on Serbia´s average height. 

As you can see in the graphics the top five is totally dominated by European teams such as Serbia, Denmark, France, Belgium and Germany. There are seven teams in the top 10 of the tallest teams in the World Cup. 

The rest of the list consists of three African teams in the form of Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia, which leaves us back with not a single country from the rest of the continents. 

Despite football being a physical game, being the tallest team doesn’t count for much as Serbia are over 100 to one to win the tournament judging by bet365 and Betfair.

Shortest World Cup Player – Tariq Lamptey

Brighton & Hove Albion and Ghana full-back, Tariq Lamptey, is the shortest player participating in the World Cup with a height of 163 cm. 

There is not a single European player of the top five shortest players in the World Cup and you can see a complete overview of the list here:

• Tariq Lamptey, 163 cm, Ghana.
• Collins Fai, 165 cm, Cameroon.
• Yuki Soma, 166 cm, Japan.
• Lucas Torreira, 166 cm, Uruguay.
• Papu Gomez, 167 cm, Argentina.

Tallest World Cup Player – Andries Noppert 

The tallest player participating in the World Cup is the Dutch goalkeeper, Andries Noppert, who is 203 cm. England’s Nick Pope is the fifth tallest player in the World Cup with a height of 198 cm, but he is not the only present Premier League player who is among the tallest players in the World Cup. 

Welsh goalkeeper, Wayne Hennessy, is also on the list and he is also 198 cm tall, with former Chelsea goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois also being among the top-five tallest players participating at this year’s tournament in Qatar.  You might already have noticed the list is dominated by goalkeepers, and actually all top five tallest players are goalkeepers. 

You can see the full list of the top five tallest players in the World Cup here: 

• Andries Noppert, 203 cm, Netherlands.
• Vanja Milinkovic-Savic, 202 cm, Serbia.
• Thibaut Courtois, 200 cm, Belgium.
• Wayne Hennessy, 198 cm, Wales.
• Nick Pope, 198 cm, England.

Methodology:

We used Transfermarkt as the source to find all the players that are participating in the World Cup. From there we scraped the players’ height which in the end led us to the results of the shortest and the tallest teams.