Debunking a drunk man’s football theory. For no real reason.
Can you pick a winning World Cup fantasy team using no information about the players except how tall they are? I measured all 1,248 of them to find out.
The 75th minute
Sprawled across the sofa somewhere in the approach to 4am, I was watching the most exciting match in England's history: Mexico versus England at the Azteca. I had that delirious, giggly feeling children get when they know they should be in bed and are losing the fight to keep their eyes open.
Truth be told, I know very little about football. For example: before this point, I had no idea the England bench ran deep enough to include the Balrog of Morgoth. But here he was: Dan Burn, sent on as a substitute in the closing stages. I watched him wade through the match a full head and shoulders above seemingly everyone, and something in me psychologically broke. Some mixture of euphoric joy and sleep deprivation forced a laugh up out of my diaphragm and woke my long-suffering cat.
And, reader, the Balrog can play. Everything deflected off him. Every challenge destroyed. Every Mexican hope vanquished to wherever hopes go when Gandalf and the Balrog go tumbling through the mines of Moria, or wherever it was. Six clearances, four of them headed, every aerial duel won. Per Opta, the most clearances by any player brought on after the 75th minute in World Cup history. The oldest England outfield World Cup debutant since Stanley Matthews in 1950.
The next morning, foggy on the train, clutching a corporate-branded keepy cup with a Tesco Gold Blend Finest burning through the lettering and some faded copy about data analysis, I overheard an alcohol-enthused all-nighter of an England fan announce to the whole carriage: "It's all just headers and chipping it into the tall boys these days. That's why all the tall lads are so expensive."
Is that true? Can it be? That thought, tangled up with something I'd half-heard once about the size of a racehorse's heart ventricles predicting who wins, is what started me down this hole. And now you're in it too.
The first thing I found
So I did what any reasonable, sleep-deprived person does with a stranger's drunken theory. I checked it. And the very first chart I plotted is still my favourite, because for one glorious second it made the man on the train look like a genius. This is headed goals per 1,000 minutes, split into height bands. Hover a bar for the detail.
For most of the range it is flat, noisy, unconvincing. Then, above 190cm, it detonates. Players in the 190 to 194cm band score headed goals at 0.784 per 1,000 minutes, roughly six times the rate of the 180 to 184cm band. This is the single most convincing thing height does in the whole dataset, and it is what spurred me on. It is also, notice, a very thin slice of very tall people.
But here is where the drunk oracle comes unstuck. Heading only feels ubiquitous. It is actually in retreat: headers made up 23.7% of World Cup goals in 2018, 18.4% in 2022, and just 17.9% now. The one thing height is unarguably good at is quietly going out of fashion. He was half right and half hammered.
Band-level scoring rates via FBref through the QFs. Per-player heading attempt data is not published, so these are scoring rates, not conversion rates. Of the 46 confirmed headed goals, the split by position is forwards 22, midfielders 13, defenders 11.
Right, so who is even tall?
Average squad height, tallest to shortest. Hover any bar for the number. Two things jump out.
Norway (187.2cm) and Bosnia (187.1cm) are the giants. And down at the bottom, 44th of 48, sit Argentina (179.6cm), who reached the semi-finals. The shortest squads at the tournament include the world's number one, among the last four. If height were destiny, someone forgot to tell the log table. Call it a Simpson's Paradox warning shot: the aggregate ranking and the actual results are pulling in opposite directions.
The two extremes
Across all 1,248 players, the tournament stretches a full 45 centimetres, from the tallest man selected to the shortest.
The spread inside a squad
Averages hide the good stuff. Here is the full range, shortest to tallest player, gold dot at the mean. Austria runs from 168cm all the way to Wiegele's 205; England tops out at Dan Burn's 201. Hover a dot for the detail.
Squad means and ranges over all 26 named players per team. Global scale 158 to 207cm.
Where does the height live?
Sort every position by average height and the order is almost boringly logical, until you notice how far out on their own the keepers are, and that the midfield is where height goes to die.
Goalkeepers average 189.8cm. Defenders (183.8) edge out forwards (181.4). Midfielders (180.0) are, on average, nearly ten centimetres shorter than the keepers.
This matters for the experiment. A height-only draft is secretly a goalkeeper-and-centre-back strategy. It loads the back of the team and starves the middle, which is the exact area where most games are actually decided.
"That's why the tall lads are expensive"
The man on the train had a second theory, remember: the tall lads are so pricey precisely because they are tall. It sounds obvious. So I took the market's own verdict on who the stars are, their transfer value in euros, and checked their heights. The theory dies immediately.
The 50 most valuable footballers at the World Cup are, on average, two centimetres shorter than the tournament as a whole. The correlation between height and market value is −0.025, which is indistinguishable from nothing. Sort by international caps and the most-capped players come out shorter too.
The reason is that the game's crown jewels are small, quick, low-centre-of-gravity attackers. The most valuable list is headed by Lamine Yamal (183), Pedri (174), Mbappé (180), Vitinha (170), Bernardo Silva (173), and the little genius himself, Messi at 170cm. The market pays fortunes for balance, close control and acceleration. It does not pay for centimetres. The tall lads are not expensive. The expensive lads are small.
Plotted, the point is unmissable. Here is transfer value against height for the tournament's marquee names. If tall meant expensive, the dots would climb up to the right. Instead they scatter. The two most valuable players sit twelve centimetres apart in height, and most of the genuine giants (in red) drift toward the bargain end.
The convoluted extra analysis, in which nothing correlates
Here is the deflating part, and regular readers will recognise it as Issue 6: Data Dredging. Spelling bees "predict" spider deaths; coffee preference "predicts" sociopathy. Torture enough variables and one of them confesses. So I tortured height. Outside the narrow world of aerial goals, it correlates with essentially nothing. Near zero means no relationship.
Height versus career goals is −0.059. Height versus how many letters are in your surname is −0.015. In this dataset, your height predicts your goal tally about as well as your name length does, which is to say, not at all.
Even the height distribution is boringly normal
Where does everyone actually sit? Hover a bar. The peak is 180 to 184cm; the giants of our XI live out in the thin tail on the right.
And survival won't behave either
The average height of teams still standing wobbles instead of climbing: 48 teams 182.8cm, then last 32 183.1, last 16 182.8, quarters 183.9, semis 182.7. Height giveth (tall Norway reached the quarters) and taketh away (tall Bosnia went out in the round of 32). There is no clean "taller teams go further" line to draw. There rarely is.
If you forced me to name one number
So I built a deliberately over-engineered index, the IPH. Weight every player by how much the market rates them, break it down by position, and ask what height all that money actually rewards.
The most valuable height at this World Cup is 182.5cm, a normal, athletic, entirely unremarkable footballer. Not a giant. Given every degree of freedom to fall in love with tall players, the algorithm shrugged and pointed at the exact middle of the distribution. That is a problem for anyone hoping height alone builds a team. But I promised an experiment, so let's build the daft one anyway.
The whole point, the reveal
The team you get if you draft the tallest player who actually played, position by position. No form, no reputation, no tactics, just a tape measure. Average height: 198.3cm. The tallest starting eleven physically possible from this tournament.
Note who selected himself into central defence purely by being 201cm: Dan Burn. The whole experiment, drafting on height alone, walks straight back to the exact man who started it, alongside Bosnia's Radeljić, the joint-tallest to touch the grass. (The genuinely tallest man selected, Austria's Wiegele at 205cm, never played a minute, so he does not make it.)
The height-only team scores 93 simplified fantasy points to the shortest team's 58, a 60% win. So the daft strategy beats the opposite daft strategy. Dan Burn, drafted by accident, pulls his weight. But the team you'd pick on merit scores 359. The tape measure gets you to 93. It beats ignorance. It does not come close to beating knowing what you're doing.
Can you win a World Cup with a tape measure? You can beat the short team. You can accidentally draft a folk hero. You cannot win.
Height is the same. A real edge in one thin band, and noise everywhere else. A tape measure gets you Dan Burn having the night of his life at the Azteca. It does not get you the trophy. For that you still have to watch the football and, annoyingly, know something about it.
Simplified fantasy scoring: 2 pts per appearance, position-weighted pts per goal, 3 per assist. No clean sheets or cards. A toy model to make the comparison, not a real fantasy engine.