In 1990, roughly one in four players at the FIFA World Cup was based at a club outside the country his national team represented. At the 2026 edition it is nearly three in four. That is a structural shift in a labour market, and it has a surprisingly precise cause: a 1995 court ruling. I pulled the squad data together, cleaned it into a small CSV, and put it on GitHub under CC BY 4.0 so anyone can check the trend or build on it. This post walks through what the data shows and how to reproduce th