Watching the World Cup, I noticed that the shirt manufacturers are doing a better job of including accented characters. It used to be that only the 26 a-z characters appeared on jerseys.
The use of characters beyond a-z is uneven. Kylian Mbappé will take part in the final this weekend. The first two results in a search for “Kylian Mbappé’s Jersey” turns up one with and without the accent:
Kylian Mbappé’s Jersey
I was curious about what letters have appeared in World Cup players’ names. It’s impossible to know what went on every jersey back in time when photographs were rarer, and early jerseys probably didn’t have names at all. But, there’s a handy page of squads for each World Cup on Wikipedia, eg: 1930 FIFA World Cup squads. So I quickly calculated how often every character appeared across all squads, which gives the count of how often each letter is used across every single Word Cup player’s (romanized) name:
| Character | Appearances |
| a | 14062 |
| e | 11017 |
| o | 9890 |
| r | 9888 |
| i | 9627 |
| n | 8896 |
| l | 7103 |
| s | 6676 |
| m | 4426 |
| d | 4405 |
| t | 4383 |
| u | 3789 |
| h | 3597 |
| c | 3447 |
| g | 3083 |
| b | 2738 |
| k | 2658 |
| v | 2236 |
| j | 1937 |
| p | 1683 |
| z | 1652 |
| y | 1647 |
| f | 1376 |
| w | 829 |
| é | 671 |
| á | 605 |
| í | 352 |
| ć | 305 |
| ó | 252 |
| q | 190 |
| š | 161 |
| x | 146 |
| ö | 108 |
| ú | 98 |
| ü | 95 |
| č | 84 |
| ñ | 66 |
| ł | 51 |
| ž | 40 |
| ç | 38 |
| ã | 37 |
| ø | 36 |
| ä | 31 |
| ă | 28 |
| ý | 25 |
| ï | 22 |
| ë | 20 |
| ř | 19 |
| å | 18 |
| ş | 17 |
| ő | 16 |
| đ | 15 |
| æ | 11 |
| ð | 11 |
| ż | 11 |
| è | 10 |
| ě | 10 |
| ı | 10 |
| ô | 9 |
| ń | 9 |
| ō | 9 |
| ß | 8 |
| à | 6 |
| â | 5 |
| î | 5 |
| ą | 5 |
| ğ | 4 |
| ț | 4 |
| ś | 3 |
| ū | 3 |
| ș | 3 |
| ň | 2 |
| ť | 2 |
| ű | 2 |
| ò | 1 |
| õ | 1 |
| þ | 1 |
| ď | 1 |
| ľ | 1 |
| œ | 1 |
| ů | 1 |
| ź | 1 |
| ǎ | 1 |
There’s 83 in total! There are 9 that occur only once. The last of these in the list, “ǎ”, is from Ion Lăpușneanu, who was Romania’s goalkeeper in 1930 (in case you were wondering).
There are many players in the World Cup whose names are really written in Hangul, Cyrrlic, Arabic, Hiragana and other completely different scripts. For a tournament that literally begins with “World”, the least we can do is ensure that players get to wear shirts that spell their names the same way that they do. It’s good to see the tournament moving in this direction!
Robert Munro
July, 2018
