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As silly as it might seem, whoever wins the 2026 World Cup is going to have an outsize impact on who the soccer world decides is the best soccer player in the world.
Sure, there are 11 players on each team. And OK, fine, the best players have possession of the ball for only about three total minutes every match. And yeah, it’s entirely possible that the best soccer player in the world right now had the “misfortune” of being born in, say, Georgia — no, not the one with the peaches.
But that doesn’t stop Ballon d’Or voters from leaning aggressively toward selecting a player from whatever team won the World Cup whenever the vote falls in a World Cup year.
To put it more specifically: If Portugal win the World Cup, there’s a very real chance that Cristiano Ronaldo wins the Ballon d’Or — despite the fact that he’s 41 years old and hasn’t had a real impact on the highest levels of club soccer in at least five years.
So, ahead of the tournament, let’s take stock of who the best soccer players at the World Cup — and by proxy, in the world — might actually be and rank them.
From left to right, Mohamed Salah, Erling Haaland, Lamine Yamal, Lionel Messi, Vinícius Júnior and Kylian Mbappé are among the 50 best players at the FIFA World Cup. ESPN IllustrationHow this World Cup player ranking will workInternational soccer is a different game from what you see at the club level — less training time, much less pressing, fewer possession patterns — but the club level is still by far the highest level, and it’s where these guys spend 90% of their professional lives. So, this list is mainly based on the past couple of seasons of club performance.No one can predict how well any of these players will do at the World Cup with their national teams — try as we all might — but what we can say for certain is how good these players are generally as they head into the World Cup, which begins on Thursday.To make this ranking more useful, the 50 selections are separated into seven tiers. After all, what is meaningfully different between the players being ranked, say, No. 41 and No. 40? By grouping players into tiers, it frames this exercise a bit more clearly.The main criterion for this ranking: How much of an impact does a given player have on his team’s chances of winning a given game?Tier 7: Winners for their clubs — but maybe not in a World Cup50. Mohamed Salah, forward, Egypt
49. Kai Havertz, forward, Germany
48. Bernardo Silva, midfielder, Portugal
47. Jules Koundé, defender, France
46. Josko Gvardiol, defender, Croatia
45. Emiliano Martínez, goalkeeper, Argentina
44. Gabriel Magalhães, center back, Brazil
43. Willian Pacho, center back, Ecuador
42. Marquinhos, center back, Brazil
41. Thibaut Courtois, goalkeeper, Belgium
For our first tier, we have a bunch of guys who help their teams win, mostly, by doing things other than scoring goals.
Salah was the toughest choice here. At this time last year, he had a genuine case to be No. 1 on this list. He fell off badly — as did everyone else on Liverpool this season — but I have a hard time believing you can genuinely go from arguably the best player in the world to outside of the top 50 that quickly.
Liverpool’s attack was especially atrocious without Salah this season. And while he genuinely looked old out there and would frequently get stuffed in one-on-one situations, he still found a way to get space in the attacking third, force the ball into the penalty area and create shots for his teammates.
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In Havertz and Silva, you have two uber-flexible players who are so good with the ball at their feet and without possession that they can play anywhere on the field and provide all kinds of value in what they allow their managers to do with the rest of the lineup.
Koundé and Gvardiol are perhaps the prime example of the sport’s newest position: what John Muller, co-founder of analytics company Futi, has referred to as an “elbow back.” These are fullback/center back hybrids who are good enough in possession to push up the field like traditional fullbacks but stout enough defensively to slide in as third center backs, too. Koundé and Gvardiol might just be world-class in both parts of the role.
The trio of Marquinhos, Pacho and Gabriel encapsulates everything modern center backs need to do: read space like Marquinhos, cover space like Pacho and score set-piece goals like Gabriel.
And as for Courtois and Martínez, I think they’re the two best keepers in the world right now. At least, they’re the two guys I would trust the most to make the biggest save in the biggest moment.
40. Casemiro, midfielder, Brazil
39. Rodri, midfielder, Spain
38. Joshua Kimmich, midfielder, Germany
37. Luka Modric, midfielder, Croatia
36. Virgil van Dijk, center back, Netherlands
Meet: a bunch of old dudes who are still very good at soccer because of what they’re able to do with the ball at their feet.
At Futi, Muller and co-founder Michael Imburgio created a model that determines how much every on-ball action a player takes — including receiving passes — both increases his team’s chances of scoring and decreases its chances of conceding a goal. In buildup play, Casemiro, Rodri, and Van Dijk all rated in the top 10 for value added in the Premier League this season.
Kimmich and Modric, meanwhile, might have been even better.
Gradient Sports has a team of analysts who grade every on-ball action across Europe every weekend, much like what Pro Football Focus does with the NFL. They then normalize the grades on a 0-100 scale. Kimmich’s passing grade of 95.8 was the third best across Europe’s Big Five leagues this season. In first? That would be 40-year-old Modric, with a grade of 98.8 for AC Milan.
35. Alexander Isak, forward, Sweden
34. Florian Wirtz, attacking midfielder, Germany
33. Yan Diomande, winger, Ivory Coast
32. Jamal Musiala, attacking midfielder, Germany
These are four players who could all easily be in the top tier this time next year or could be completely outside of the top 50.
Although he’s been injury prone, Isak was a genuinely world-class forward before joining Liverpool: defense-stretching off-ball movement, fantastic ball-carrying skill, and the ability to create shots for himself and his teammates. He moved for a Premier League-record transfer fee last summer … then scored three non-penalty goals. He broke his ankle in December.
Wirtz set the same transfer record earlier last summer, and while he wasn’t as disappointing, he didn’t light the league on fire. In the Bundesliga, and for Germany, he has looked like a sure-thing superstar — a do-it-all attacking midfielder who found space, broke defenses down off the dribble, pressed hard, and scored and created goals. At Liverpool, he did the first and third things, but little of the most valuable things.
Diomande looks like the world’s next great winger — the kind of superstar you can feed the ball to out wide and build your whole approach around his ability to break down a defense. Futi doesn’t have Bundesliga data yet, but every similar model rates Diomande as one of the five best players in the world this season.
His future is probably even more exciting than that: He did it without a bunch of superstars around him at RB Leipzig, and oh yeah: He’s only 19! But can he do it in a tougher, not-as-wide-open league? We’ve seen enough players struggle outside of Germany to keep him at No. 33 on this list.
It’s reasonable to wonder the same about Bayern Munich’s Musiala, who is every bit the prospect Wirtz was. However, he broke his ankle during last summer’s Club World Cup, and he just hasn’t looked the same after returning from injury early this year.
31. Antoine Semenyo, winger, Ghana
30. Bradley Barcola, winger, France
29. Luis Díaz, winger Colombia
28. Désiré Doué, winger, France
27. Lautaro Martínez, forward, Argentina
26. Nuno Mendes, fullback, Portugal
25. Achraf Hakimi, fullback, Morocco
24. Rayan Cherki, attacking midfielder, France
23. Jérémy Doku, winger, Belgium
22. Julián Álvarez, forward, Argentina
Things we’ve seen everyone in this tier do: be one of the best players on one of the best teams in the world.
Things we’ve never seen anyone in this tier do: be the best player on one of the best teams in the world.
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Díaz and Semenyo have been focal points at smaller clubs and then thrived in secondary roles at Liverpool, Bayern Munich and Manchester City. Doué and Barcola put up world-class numbers with PSG, but they’re both, at best, the third-best wingers on their own teams.
Their fullback teammates, Hakimi and Mendes, are maybe the last two old-school fullbacks at the top of the game. And by “old school,” I mean, “what fullbacks played like six years ago.” They’re incredible athletes who can help the attack and recover to aid the defense. And then Álvarez and Martínez — unfortunately compatriots who can’t really play together — are really hard-working and productive forwards who would make just about any team better.
I’m leaving the two Manchester City guys, Cherki and Doku, for the end of this tier because they really were two of the, at worst, 10 best players in the most competitive version of the Premier League we’ve ever seen.
By their overall rating at Futi, Cherki and Doku added the second- and third-most value in the league, respectively, per 90 minutes played. And they both mainly did it with their out-of-this-world ball-carrying skills. The only holdup: Neither one played even 2,000 minutes.
21. João Neves, midfielder, Portugal
20. Moisés Caicedo, midfielder, Ecuador
19. Federico Valverde, midfielder, Uruguay
18. Bruno Guimarães, midfielder, Brazil
17. Vitinha, midfielder, Portugal
16. Declan Rice, midfielder, England
In soccer, there really is a positional spectrum of value. If you try to break the sport down to its component parts, you quickly start to realize that everything that happens near both goals is what really matters. Meanwhile, a large chunk of what happens in the middle of the field doesn’t move the needle because so much other stuff needs to happen for it to matter.
A line-breaking pass still needs attackers who can do something with all of the space it creates, while a savvy interception might’ve saved a goal or it might’ve just prevented us from seeing a fullback make a tackle instead.
So, there’s something of a ceiling on how much a midfielder can truly drive winning, unless they’re also coming close to racking up double-digit goals and assists like Rodri did when he won the Ballon d’Or.
All of these guys, though, do pretty much everything else, at scale. It’s not a snug blanket statement — Vitinha is heavily oriented toward passing, while Valverde is a running machine — but you want all of these guys to touch the ball as much as possible. And when most of what you’re doing on the field is only fractionally valuable in terms of scoring and conceding goals, that’s what you need to do.
15. Lionel Messi, attacking midfielder, Argentina
14. Kylian Mbappé, forward, France
13. Jude Bellingham, attacking midfielder, England
12. Vinícius Júnior, forward, Brazil
11. Erling Haaland, forward, Norway
You can make an argument — a pretty good one — that this tier features the five best soccer players in the world:
• Messi is the trickiest one to judge, as he’s old and playing in MLS. At the same time, per Futi’s data, he ranks in the 99th percentile for overall value created. He has basically maxed out the potential output for an individual player:
• Mbappé won the Golden Boot in LaLiga two seasons in a row, has starred in both of the past two World Cups, and is the most accomplished player, by goals and assists, to come along since Messi.
• Bellingham was arguably the best player on Real Madrid when they won the Champions League two seasons ago — and he’s still only 22.
• Vini Jr. has already won the Champions League twice, and he finished second in Ballon d’Or voting two seasons ago.
• Haaland has scored 112 goals in the Premier League across his first four seasons.
Any of these five guys could easily be the defining player of this tournament. Frankly, it’s more likely than not that one of them will be.
But the problem with these five players is that they’re really hard to fit within a modern, organized, two-way team.
Om Arvind wrote a great piece a couple of years ago in which he took the concept of “floor raisers” and “ceiling raisers” from basketball and applied it to soccer. In the NBA, there’s a kind of spectrum where there are a couple of players in every generation who are so good that you want your entire offense to run around them — the floor raisers — but then there’s quickly diminishing returns for players with the same distribution of skills but on a slightly lower skill tier.
In other words: You want Michael Jordan, but you’d rather have a fantastic role player than a worse version of Michael Jordan.
The ceiling raisers, meanwhile, are the players who maximize the potential output of the team because they do all of the things directly connected to winning — efficient scoring, defense, movement — but don’t need to have the ball.
Haaland, Mbappé and Bellingham all should be ceiling-raiser types at the World Cup — the first two because they stretch defenses with their goal threat and because they don’t need to touch the ball too often to win games and the last one because he’s good at pretty much everything a person would ever need to do on a soccer field.
However, Haaland is so limited in possession that he requires sacrifices to be made elsewhere in the team to account for what he doesn’t provide. Although he has scored a million goals, Manchester City’s overall goal output got worse after he arrived. Mbappé, meanwhile, is the worst and least interested defender in modern soccer.
The best teams in the world are able to press their opposition high — as an offensive and defensive lever. It creates high-quality opportunities and keeps the ball away from your goal. As soon as Mbappé left PSG, they became the best pressing team in the world and immediately won back-to-back Champions League titles.
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For Bellingham, his first season with Madrid was supercharged by him being a midfielder who scored 19 goals and added six assists. When he arrived in Spain, he looked like a super-utility player who could fill any role. Instead, he immediately became a superstar attacking midfielder.
But for Bellingham to score so much, he needed the team to catered to his penchant to run into the box. (He also needed an unsustainable run of high-quality finishing.) Since that season, he hasn’t quite been able to fit into any of the more traditional midfield roles.
Now, for the third Madrid player here, Vinícius Júnior, hopefully you’re starting to see the point. A team with Mbappé, Bellingham and Vini just can’t function at the highest level. You can make it work with one of them, but not all three. And if that’s true, doesn’t it tell us something about how much each truly contributes to winning?
Vini is a floor raiser — perhaps the best in the world at progressing play from the wing into the penalty area — but he also doesn’t defend anymore. On top of that, his fluctuating goal-and-assist output has him bordering on the kind of player who sits right below that elite tier of floor raisers who can motor an elite team.
Messi is, obviously, the greatest floor raiser in the history of the sport, and when he was younger and more mobile, there was a time when he provided all of that without really taking anything off of the table defensively. Now, though, he’s 38, and Argentina’s entire approach has to be fully built around him even as his overall effectiveness has declined.
10. Martin Ødegaard, attacking midfielder, Norway
9. Bukayo Saka, winger, England
8. Raphinha, winger, Brazil
7. William Saliba, center back, France
6. Pedri, midfielder, Spain
5. Bruno Fernandes, attacking midfielder, Portugal
4. Harry Kane, forward, England
3. Michael Olise, winger, France
2. Lamine Yamal, winger, Spain
1. Ousmane Dembélé, winger, France
Consider this tier a list of players who could slot into any team in the world, not require any adjustments across the rest of the roster and conceivably be the best player on the team.
Maybe it’s not the best time to make this case for Ødegaard and Saka, after they combined for an abysmal 10 total completed passes in the Champions League final. But I think that still gets me to my same point. Although they conceded a lot of possession, Arsenal didn’t allow a single high-quality chance to PSG — outside of the penalty — when these two were on the field. And that’s because Arsenal’s two best attackers are also world-class defenders for their positions.
Despite playing in a very conservative system under Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, Saka and Ødegaard both generate significant numbers of goals and assists while also being the team’s primary means of moving the ball into the penalty area. Put either of these guys on Bayern Munich and they’re putting up silly attacking numbers, too.
Raphinha is the ideal ceiling-raising winger — he presses like mad and makes fantastic runs off the ball — but unlike other players of a similar archetype, he’s also able to break down set defenses when needed.
I’m not sure I’d apply this ceiling/floor framework to Saliba, but maybe we can. He never makes mistakes; he’s a great passer; and, via Gradient, his positioning is the highest-graded of that of any center back in the Premier League.
You can play whatever way you want with Saliba in the team — he’s just as good at covering space as he is defending in his own box — and you’re all but guaranteed a baseline of defensive performance with him in the team, too.
Pedri is the best midfielder passer in the world. There’s no one else who combines ball security, a high volume of touches, buildup play and chance creation the way he does. He’s also great at moving off the ball in the final third; he’s an incredibly active, aggressive defender.
For a long time, I had viewed Fernandes as that kind of sub-elite floor raiser we talked about earlier — the kind of guy who needs lots of touches and will post great individual stats but who puts a cap on the ceiling of his team.
But this year at Manchester United, Fernandes played in both deeper and more advanced midfield roles. He’s an amazing creator near the goal, is one of the best passers from deep and still presses however much his manager wants him to. You can make it work with him, in multiple ways.
Kane, obviously, isn’t going to press like he would under Mauricio Pochettino, but he still gives you something like a league-average work rate off the ball. And then you’re getting a world-class goal scorer who is also the best passing center forward in the world.
That leaves us with the three best wingers in the world: Olise, Yamal and Dembélé.
This is the defining position of the modern sport. These players are cheat codes — able to start possessions from less dangerous areas out wide, but then able to score and create goals at rates we typically had seen only from forwards in the past. The best ones, like these three, move the ball upfield, move the ball into the penalty area, create shots for themselves and create shots for their teammates — all at elite levels.
Olise is third because the attacking environment at Bayern Munich is a little inflated for everyone and he’s not the presser that either of the other two is. Yamal, meanwhile, is the closest thing we’ve seen to young, peak Messi or Neymar, and he’s still only 18. The only thing that was missing from his game was top-tier goal+assist production, and he got there this season. If he ever stops taking terrible long-range shots, it’s game over for everyone else.
But for now, the top spot still belongs to Dembélé.
Sure, he can treat the entire club season as a ramp-up to the Champions League final because uber-rich PSG win Ligue 1 by default, but there are two things that separate him from everyone else.
The first: He’s equally dangerous with both of his feet, which creates all kinds of new angles on the field and makes it so much easier for him to fit in with whoever else is on the roster. And second: Under manager Luis Enrique, he has become one of the best pressing forwards in the world.
Four years ago, it was France teammate Mbappé who was supposed to become the best player on the planet. He scored a hat trick in the World Cup final — the same game when Dembélé gave up a penalty and was subbed off at halftime. A year later, Dembélé joined PSG and became a peripheral figure at Mbappé’s club. But then, the following summer, Mbappé moved to Madrid and Dembélé took his place as the focal point of the attack.
So, why is Dembélé the best soccer player in the world? Almost right away, PSG became the best soccer team in the world.
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