Several things converged: fatigue with the defending champion, suspicions of refereeing favouritism, the team’s combative style of play, the claim over the Malvinas/Falklands after the semi-final against England, and the global rivalry between Messi fans and Cristiano Ronaldo fans. None of that had anything to do with racism. But there were also episodes that did: the most resonant precedent was that of Enzo Fernández, who after the 2024 Copa América streamed an offensive chant about the African origin of several French players. During this World Cup, a fan insulted the African American streamer IShowSpeed, and the deputy governor of the province of Mendoza referred to France as “an African team short on manners”.

The discussion changed scale when Samuel L. Jackson shared a post describing Argentina as “one of the most racist countries in the world, if not the most racist”. From acts committed by specific people, the debate jumped to a verdict on a society of 46 million. The claim had enormous reach, and an equally intense repudiation inside Argentina.

I have already addressed the Argentine side of the debate in this piece, where I try to separate the real episodes and problems of racism from the caricature that circulated after the World Cup. But the accusation left me with a broader question: is there any way of knowing which is the most racist country in the world? What would we have to measure to find out?

The ranking that doesn’t exist

There is no serious global ranking of racism or discrimination. The difficulty comes before the ordering: before ranking countries, we would have to decide what we are measuring.

Racism and discrimination come in many layers. A person can hold prejudices against a group, avoid sharing spaces with its members, or treat them worse in everyday life. A firm can discard CVs because of a candidate’s name, skin colour or origin. The police can stop certain groups more often. The state can have egalitarian laws and, at the same time, offer unequal access to education, health, justice or political power. Over time, all of this can translate into persistent differences in income, schooling, housing and representation.

These layers are related, but they do not always move together. A society can declare little hostility towards minorities and preserve very large gaps between groups. It can have good laws that are barely or selectively enforced. And the record itself is misleading: more reported incidents in one country does not mean more incidents happen there. It may mean, simply, that they are better identified.

A couple of clarifications before moving on. In this issue I use discrimination as a general term for the unequal treatment of people based on the groups they belong to, and racism when that hierarchy is tied to skin colour, physical features or ethnic origin. Hostility towards immigrants, religious minorities or gay people has features of its own and does not always amount to racism, but it helps answer a question that also interests us: how willing societies are to live alongside groups perceived as different.

To organise the analysis, we will look at discrimination through four lenses: what people declare (social distance), what people perceive and experience (experiences of discrimination), what institutions do (exclusion by social group) and what happens in the end to opportunities (structural outcomes). None offers the full picture, but each lights up a different part of the phenomenon. Let’s take a look.

Who wouldn’t you want next door?

Since the 1980s, the IVS (Integrated Values Surveys) has tracked the attitudes and values of populations in more than 100 countries. One of its questions targets declared social distance, a fairly explicit form of rejection: “On this list are various groups of people. Could you please mention any that you would not like to have as neighbours?” The list includes a range of groups, such as people of a different race, immigrants, homosexuals and people of a different religion.

The most recent snapshot shows enormous differences. Among the Latin American countries surveyed, average rejection of neighbours of “a different race” is 9%, against a world average of 17%. Western Europe registers 7%, and the wealthy English-speaking offshoots (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), 4%. At the other end sit Southeast Asia, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, all regions above 20%. Like every chart in The Atlas, the one that follows is interactive.

Latin America, in any case, is far from uniform. In Uruguay, just 0.6% say they would not want neighbours of a different race, the lowest figure among the countries surveyed. In Brazil the figure is 1.4% and in Argentina, 2.7%. These are levels similar to those of Sweden, the United States or France, and considerably lower than Spain’s and Italy’s, both around 12%. At the other regional extreme sits Guatemala, where rejection reaches 30%, one of the highest values in the world, though far below Myanmar and Vietnam, which top 60%.

The pattern repeats when the question turns to other groups (you can see it by switching the category in the chart). Latin America declares less rejection than most regions towards immigrants, people of another religion and gay people. Here too, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay rank among the most open countries on the planet.

These comparisons call for caution. “Race”, “immigrant” or even “neighbour” may not evoke the same thing in every society. What people declare is also filtered by what each society considers acceptable to admit to a pollster, and it does not predict how that person will later behave. That is why it pays to focus on the large differences and the regional patterns rather than on each country’s exact position. Even so, admitting that you would rather not live near people from another group expresses an intense social barrier: the indicator does not measure all discrimination, but it does capture one of its most direct faces.

More tolerant than expected

Declared tolerance tends to rise with development. A classic explanation holds that greater material security lowers the perception of threat and eases the acceptance of other groups. The relationship shows up quite clearly in attitudes towards homosexuality, but is much weaker for immigration. In no case, at any rate, does the level of development explain everything.

The next chart illustrates the relationship. On the horizontal axis, GDP per capita (how rich a country is). On the vertical axis, the share of the population that says it would not want neighbours of a different race. Each dot is a country, coloured by region.

As we have seen in other issues of The Atlas, a line (the “regression line”) summarises the average relationship between the two variables. Here the slope is negative: the richer a country, the lower its declared rejection tends to be. But what interests us most is what the level of development fails to explain. The distance between what we observe in each country and what the line predicts is what, since the first issue, we have been calling “the residual”.

And there the Latin American trait appears: on average, the region shows about 10 percentage points less rejection of neighbours of a different race than its income level would predict; Guatemala aside, every one of its countries sits below the line. The same goes for the other categories: 12 points less towards immigrants, 8 less towards people of another religion and 26 less towards gay people. The inverse pattern appears across much of Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where explicit rejection runs well above what their development levels would suggest.

This first lens leaves a narrow but relevant conclusion: Latin America shows little explicit hostility to living alongside people who are different, especially given its level of development. It will take much more to know how much that tells us about the discrimination that exists in practice.

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Seeing and living discrimination

The same IVS asks how often “racist behaviour” is observed in the neighbourhood. Here Latin America blends into the world: the average among Latin American countries is 14.5%, almost identical to the world average (14%).

The internal differences, once again, are large. In Chile and Brazil, about 30% say they see racist behaviour very or fairly often in their neighbourhood. Those figures are nothing like Argentina’s (11%) or Uruguay’s (7%).

Something interesting emerges when we cross this question with the one from the previous section. The two variables barely correlate. Some countries, like Uruguay, score low on both. But in others the gap is enormous, and in both directions. Brazil appears as one of the most tolerant countries in the world on the neighbours question and, at the same time, as one of those that observe the most racism in their neighbourhoods; Chile and the United States show a similar pattern. The opposite happens with Myanmar and Vietnam: they admit sky-high levels of rejection of neighbours of a different race, yet report little racist behaviour around them.

A second source, the World Risk Poll, asks whether the respondent has suffered discrimination because of their skin colour. Here Latin America comes out somewhat above the world: the regional average is 11%, against 8% worldwide. And the disconnect reappears: several countries that declared great openness towards neighbours stand out again for the opposite. In Brazil, 18% say they have been discriminated against for their skin colour; in the United States, 27% (the highest value among the countries surveyed).

How do declared tolerance and lived discrimination produce such different maps? Because perception and experience surveys are not a purely objective record of facts. To report discrimination there must first be a situation of contact; then the person must recognise the treatment as unfair and attribute it to their skin colour or origin. All of that depends on how diverse each society is, on the size of the exposed groups, and on expectations about how each person ought to be treated. The same behaviour can be read as discriminatory in one society and go unnoticed in another where it is more normalised. The OECD finds that self-reported discrimination tends to be higher in more diverse, more unequal and higher-income regions: part of it may reflect more discriminatory acts; part, a greater awareness of the problem and more demanding expectations of equality.

Class comes first

The Argentine debate around the World Cup exposed another difficulty: categories do not travel intact. In the United States, race occupies an especially explicit place in official statistics and public conversation. In much of Latin America, racial classifications tend to be more gradual and less codified. Social hierarchies are organised through a combination of class, skin colour, territory and national origin.

The next chart, built with Latinobarómetro data, shows how each society names those hierarchies. In 2020, the survey asked which people or groups were the most discriminated against in the country. Each respondent could choose a single answer from more than 40 options, which we group here into broader categories.

The regional rule is clear: in 14 of the 18 countries, the most frequent answer was “the poor”. The exceptions were Brazil, Colombia and Panama, three countries with a sizeable Afro-descendant population, where the categories tied to race or ethnicity came first, and Nicaragua, where “none” won. The contrast between Brazil and Argentina is illustrative. In the former, 53% name racial or ethnic groups as the most discriminated against and 25% the poor; in the latter, 27% point to the poor, just 12% to racial or ethnic groups, and the rest is spread across age, gender and other categories.

Does this mean Latin America is classist rather than racist? No: what the survey measures is how each society names discrimination, not how much of it there is or of what kind. And naming matters, because in Latin America, as in many other regions, race and class overlap. Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations are over-represented among the lowest earners, so when a Latin American says “here, the poor are discriminated against”, part of that discrimination has a skin colour even if it is not called that. Put differently: in the United States, that overlap tends to be read more explicitly in racial terms; in most of Latin America, it tends to be read first in terms of class. That can make the racial component less visible, but it does not make it disappear.

The doors the state closes

The previous lenses look at people. The third shifts the gaze to the state: do different social groups have similar access to rights, public services, state employment and political power? Does an ethnic or religious minority, say, have less access to education or healthcare than everyone else? The academic project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) tries to measure this dimension (institutional exclusion) with expert assessments for each country, aggregated through a statistical model. Its index of exclusion by social group is not limited to racial or ethnic divisions: it also considers groups defined by religion, language, region or caste.

Here Latin America comes out somewhat worse than the world average, though far from the extremes. The lowest levels of institutional exclusion are found in developed countries, above all in Western Europe; the highest, in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. And the regional heterogeneity is once again enormous: Costa Rica, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Chile show fairly low levels, not far from those of developed countries, while Nicaragua, Guatemala, Paraguay and Peru rank among the region’s worst. One important caveat: since the index spans divisions of many kinds, factors other than racism can weigh on the high values. It is, then, a broad measure of the doors the state keeps more firmly shut for certain groups rather than a specific thermometer of racism.

The blind lens

The fourth lens, structural outcomes, is where comparable data is scarcest. The question is what happens at the end of the day to the opportunities of different groups: whether they earn similar incomes, reach similar levels of education, show gaps in health. The problem is that many countries do not collect this information regularly. Argentina is a clear example: its regular socioeconomic data comes from its main household survey (the Encuesta Permanente de Hogares), which contains no question on race or ethnicity. That contrasts with Brazil, the United States and South Africa, where these variables are collected periodically in official social statistics.

What we do know, as we saw in another issue of The Atlas, is that Latin America is too unequal for its income level. But standard distributional indicators like the Gini only measure how steep the pyramid is, not who occupies each floor: they cannot tell whether the gaps separate racial or ethnic groups or run within each one. We know the Latin American pyramid is among the steepest in the world; what we cannot measure, in many countries, is how much skin colour shapes the floor each person gets.

An impossible question

Which is, then, the most racist country in the world? The answer changes with the lens. One country may lead in declared rejection, another in experiences of discrimination, another in institutional exclusion; on outcomes, for most countries there is not even data. Could we attempt a single number synthesising all of this? It would be hard for it not to be heavily arbitrary. What we can draw, though, are regional profiles.

Latin America declares relatively little rejection of people of a different race (something exceptional for its level of development); observes racism in its neighbourhoods in line with the world average; reports discrimination by skin colour somewhat above the average; has levels of institutional exclusion slightly above the world average; and has one of the highest levels of income inequality on the planet. Most of its countries, moreover, name their hierarchies first in terms of poverty and class rather than race.

Within that profile there are relevant variations. Brazil bears a family resemblance to the United States and South Africa in the weight of the racial component of discrimination. Uruguay is a different animal: through every lens we have looked at, it ranks among the best positioned in the region, and sits closer to Western Europe.

And Argentina, the villain of the piece? It stands halfway between the regional average and Uruguay: inside a region with problems, but with nothing that places it at a global extreme. That is more than enough to show that the label of “the most racist country in the world” has no basis. Among other reasons, because such a country probably does not exist.

Recommendations

Visual 1. Humanæ, by Brazilian artist Angélica Dass: thousands of portraits on backgrounds that reproduce each person’s skin tone. The project shows how much diversity hides behind labels like “white” or “black”.

Visual 2. The Everyday Projects: a global network of photographers portraying daily life far from the stereotypes through which we tend to look at other societies. Their images offer another way of thinking about how the “other” is visually constructed.

Interactive. Project Implicit, a site with various Implicit Association Tests. The tests measure how easily we link certain groups to positive or negative attributes and let us compare those automatic associations with what we consciously believe.

Explore the interactive charts

The Atlas — Mapping development from Latin America, issue 4 — August 1st 2026.

Then the ball starts rolling, and something comes loose. The country that sits mid-table in almost every global ranking suddenly plays as if it had some invisible machinery behind it. Its players press, dribble, thread a pass nobody else saw, find space where there seemed to be none. A kid who grew up kicking a ball around a dirt lot or a neighbourhood club in a small provincial town, and who left home as a teenager to live in a club academy residence, competes on equal terms with footballers born into the most expensive sporting structures on the planet. And, often enough, beats them.

South America has been producing that anomaly for decades. Far from being a wealthy region or a populous one, in men’s football it has always been near the top: Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay have spent a century among the best in the world, and the region as a whole performs as if it were much bigger and richer than it is. There is no World Cup broadcast where the rundown of contenders leaves out Argentina and Brazil; and no tournament where Uruguay or Colombia are not among the sides with a real chance of sending a favourite home.

That is what we will try to understand here: why South America produces such good national teams, where it got that edge, and whether it can hold on to it. Let’s take a look.

Ten for ten

The chart is simple. On the horizontal axis, the size of each economy. (Unlike previous issues of The Atlas, where we used GDP per capita, here we use total GDP: a country’s economic mass, wealth and population combined.) On the vertical axis, the strength of its national team, measured by the Elo index, named after its creator, the Hungarian-American physicist and chess player Árpád Élő. Borrowed from chess, it scores each team by its results, weighting the quality of the opponent and the importance of the match (a World Cup final and a friendly do not count the same). Each dot is a country, coloured by its confederation. We take the average for the twenty-first century so far. As with every Atlas chart, it is interactive: you can slide the window back to 1980 and watch the dots redraw themselves.

As we have seen in other issues, these charts have a line (the “regression line”) that marks what is expected: here, the football performance predicted by the size of an economy. The relationship is positive: in general, the bigger an economy (because it is richer, more populous, or both), the higher the Elo. But what matters is not the line so much as what departs from it. That distance between what we observe and what we would predict is what we have been calling, since the first issue, “the residual.” And in football, the South American residual is enormous.

South America performs 18% above what its economy would predict (273 Elo points). And it is not just Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay: all ten members of CONMEBOL (the South American confederation), without exception, sit above the line, even the ones nobody would associate with footballing greatness, like Venezuela or Bolivia. The pattern extends, though much more faintly, north into Latin America: Central America and Mexico also post a positive residual (Nicaragua aside), only at a far shorter distance from the line than their neighbours to the south.

The most extreme case in the world, the dot furthest from the line in the entire chart, is Uruguay: a positive residual of 34%. The Uruguayan economy ranks 91st in the world; in footballing strength, the country climbs to 11th. And that is with the analysis starting in 2000, leaving out the golden Uruguayan eras, when a country of some two million people won two World Cups (1930 and 1950) and two Olympic golds (1924 and 1928, which at the time counted as world titles). A second figure confirms the oddity from another angle. Pantheon, an MIT project, measures how globally remembered a public figure is (by how many languages their Wikipedia article appears in and how often it is visited from around the world). Among the 1,000 most-remembered footballers in history, Uruguay has nearly 11 memorable figures per million inhabitants, more than any other country. Behind that number stand reference points from different generations (Obdulio Varela, Enzo Francescoli, Luis Suárez), which show that Uruguayan talent was a constant across the decades rather than the product of a single golden age.

Brazil also sits above the predictable, though its residual is more moderate (16%). Its greatness comes less from overperforming than from sheer scale: it produces stars in enormous quantities, but because it is a giant country; adjusted per head, the feat dilutes. Uruguay is the inverse case: it does not produce that many in total, but an astonishing number for its size. With a positive residual of 22%, Argentina lands between its two neighbours.

CONMEBOL is not the only confederation above the line. UEFA (Europe) also plays better than its GDP predicts, though by a considerably smaller margin (10% more, around 145 Elo points) and with far more internal spread. Most European sides overperform their economic size, but some fall below it (Luxembourg, say, or Azerbaijan). Among the most outlying Europeans there is a sharp regional pattern: the Balkan nations of the former Yugoslavia behave like South Americans. Croatia, whose Elo is 30% higher than its GDP would suggest, is almost a Uruguay: fewer than four million people, World Cup runners-up in 2018 and semi-finalists at two other tournaments (1998 and 2022). Portugal and Spain show up as positive outliers too, a little less extreme but just as clear.

Now to the ones below the line, the countries that underperform their economic weight. The first thing that jumps out is the planet’s two largest powers: the United States and China, both comfortably below. But the clearest pattern is regional: Asia is the continent with the most negative residual of all (−19%).

The chart lays the South American puzzle bare. But before tackling it, let’s start with the basics: what does the size of an economy have to do with footballing performance?

Money and people

Before chasing the South American anomaly, it is worth understanding the least mysterious part of the chart: why the size of an economy is tied to playing better. Total GDP blends two distinct advantages. The first is wealth: richer countries have more resources to invest in sporting infrastructure, to hire elite coaches and specialists, and to keep children healthier. The second is population: more people means more chances that exceptional talent appears. In a country of 100,000 it is very unlikely a star emerges; in one of 200 million, the pool is vastly larger.

That said, wealth and population, important as they are, do not go all the way: together they explain barely 44% of footballing strength. The other 56% is where the residual lives. South American exceptionalism cannot be explained by money and people: it sits in that 56%. Let’s go looking for it.

A century’s head start

Football reached South America very early. It began in the River Plate region through the British who, at the end of the nineteenth century, ran the railways, banks and ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. From there it soon passed to the local population, who began to make the game their own and to found their own clubs. One of the first football leagues outside the British Isles was played in Buenos Aires in 1891; the association that is today the AFA dates to 1893 and ranks among the five oldest in the world. This early start spread across the rest of the region: by 1925, almost every South American country had its own football association and a growing infrastructure of clubs.

The map that follows captures this. Each country is coloured by the median founding year of its current clubs: in Argentina that year is 1911, in Paraguay 1916, in Uruguay 1920, which means half the clubs active today in those countries were founded before then. The index weights clubs by relevance (measured by how many Wikipedia languages they appear in), so River, Olimpia and Peñarol count for more than little-known clubs. South America and Europe come out in dark brown, signalling long-standing club infrastructure. Asia, Africa, the United States, Canada and Australia, in blues, are countries with young clubs, where football arrived recently.

Alongside the size of the economy, the depth of its football tradition is one of the strongest predictors of current performance. It makes sense: the older the tradition, the more time football had to lay down three things you cannot buy overnight. First, institutions: clubs, leagues, neighbourhood tournaments, scouting networks, administrators, coaches. Second, know-how: ways of training, of watching players, of correcting technique, of competing from a young age, of passing the craft between generations. Third, social desire: families who take their children to the club, kids who dream of becoming their idols, whole neighbourhoods that recognise talent before a scout ever does. In a country where football arrived a hundred years ago, each generation does not start from scratch: it inherits a network. Precarious, unequal and messy, but a network that multiplies the chances that a talent appears, is seen, is pushed, is shaped, and makes it to the top.

But here an apparent paradox appears. If the British brought football, why did it not catch on just as strongly in the countries with the deepest historical ties to the United Kingdom, like the United States, Canada or Australia? The reasons are several, but different studies converge on one point. In those countries, by the time football began to spread around the world, other sports of the Anglophone world had already taken the centre of national sporting life: baseball and American football in the United States, ice hockey in Canada, cricket, rugby and Australian rules football in Australia. Each had its clubs, leagues, calendars, heroes, rivalries and rituals. Football arrived in societies where the symbolic, institutional and commercial space of “national sport” was already largely taken.

Football took everything

The paradox of the former British colonies points to something more general: a country’s footballing strength depends on how much competition football meets for its talent. When another sport has already taken that centre, football is left as a supporting actor and never fully takes off. When it arrives and finds no rival, it takes everything: the fans, the institutions, the kids who dream.

But antiquity alone does not close the puzzle. Europe also has old clubs and also performs above expectations, though considerably less than South America. Why, if both have long traditions, is the South American residual nearly double? Here the second factor comes in: competition between sports comes in degrees, and the South American monopoly runs deeper than the European one. In Europe football is the king of sports, but it reigns surrounded by powerful satellites (tennis, basketball, cycling, rugby, the winter sports) that draw off their share of the talent. A European kid with an exceptional physique might end up in any of those channels. In South America there are almost no satellites: that kid plays football, full stop.

The chart that follows crosses those two dimensions. On the horizontal axis, what share of each country’s most-remembered athletes (per Pantheon) are footballers: the further right, the more talent concentrated in football. On the vertical axis, the antiquity of the clubs: the lower down, the deeper the footballing tradition. The four quadrants tell different stories.

The bottom-right is the South American quadrant par excellence: old clubs and talent channelled almost entirely into football. Paraguay and Uruguay are the most extreme cases on the chart. The bottom-left is European: long tradition, but diversified talent; that is where most UEFA countries sit. The top-right gathers mostly African countries with recent club infrastructure and a high degree of specialisation in football, like Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire. And the top-left holds those with young clubs and sporting talent heavily absorbed by other disciplines, like the United States, Canada, Australia and India. In that quadrant a peculiar Latin American appears: the Dominican Republic, famous for its baseball players and not its footballers.

South American exceptionalism, then, is not just about antiquity: it is antiquity plus monopoly. Football arrived early and took everything.

The empty pitch

That combination (arriving early and taking everything) explains much of the residual, but it also begs to be explained: why did it happen right here, and not somewhere else in the world? The answer lies in the moment the ball came ashore. At the end of the nineteenth century, the River Plate was living through one of the fastest, earliest urbanisations in the developing world: Buenos Aires and Montevideo were filling with immigrants and growing at a dizzying pace. Football landed in that social mix at exactly the right time: a new game, urban, cheap, asking for nothing more than a ball and an open patch of ground, that could belong to everyone at once, and that in time ended up giving that newly arrived mass something in common. And it landed on an empty pitch, with no earlier sport already holding the place.

Europe had the antiquity but never the monopoly: many of its great sports (tennis, cycling, rugby, the winter sports) are European in origin and were organised in the same nineteenth century as football, so football was born competing with local traditions of its own age. The United States, Canada and Australia urbanised early, but the spot was already taken. Africa has been building its footballing passion, but far later. South America, and above all the River Plate, had all three at once: it arrived early, it arrived in cities that were exploding, and it arrived to an empty pitch.

The murmur of the residual

Football’s early arrival and its monopoly over talent explain a good part of South American exceptionalism. But it is worth measuring how much. When we looked at GDP alone, South America came out 273 Elo points above expectation. Once we add club antiquity and the concentration of talent in a single sport, that surplus falls to 75 points. It is a huge drop: those two variables explain most of the oddity. But not all of it. And so the question returns: what pieces are missing to finish explaining the South American anomaly?

In academia, several hypotheses are floating around. A meat-rich diet, which would favour the physical and cognitive development of children. Inequality and poverty, which would turn football into one of the few visible routes upward and push the most talented to chase it rather than another career. A temperate climate, which allows outdoor play almost year-round. Less structured forms of street play (the dirt-lot kickabout, the pickup game), able to train improvisation, guile and flexibility. None is far-fetched and all are plausible. But so far the evidence on their real impact is fairly thin.

That is why part of South American exceptionalism still has no name: a murmur you can hear but cannot quite catch. And maybe that is where, deep down, part of its charm lies: however much we turn the numbers over, a remainder is left that no explanation fully exhausts. That stubborn oddity is, perhaps, part of what makes South American football mythical.

* * *

Every four years, the question will not be whether South America keeps producing good footballers. It would be strange if it stopped: there are too many clubs, too much memory, too many families who recognise a different kind of dribble before anyone else. The question is whether that edge will keep being enough. And the answer pulls both ways.

Working against it is the technification of football: the more that player development depends on science, data, nutrition and money, the better positioned rich countries are to turn resources into sporting advantage. And the globalisation of football threatens to drain talent, as already happens to Africa and the Caribbean, who watch their best players, born in the diaspora, pull on European shirts. But those same forces also push the other way. South American footballers now move to European leagues more than ever, and there they soak up all that sophistication, which they later give back to their national teams. And as long as those national teams stay powerful, the kid with two passports will keep choosing the shirt of his birth country over the European one, just as Argentines of Italian descent who could play for Italy choose Argentina.

That is the key: the South American advantage protects itself. As long as it wins, it keeps its own and even attracts those of divided origin; the day it starts losing, it will start losing them too. Perhaps the next great match will not be against a European power at a World Cup, but against an entire world bent on manufacturing, with method and budget, what South America learned to multiply with history, desire and a ball that has been rolling for over a century.

Recommendations

Visual. Football Around the World, by Magnum Photos, one of the world’s leading documentary photography cooperatives. Stunning images of footballing scenes from every corner of the planet.

Data to play with. World Trade Cup, from the Observatory of Economic Complexity, a World Cup trivia game for guessing, match by match, which country exports more to the other across different products.

Academic 1. A recent paper analyses the Messi–Ronaldo rivalry to show that even an apparently footballing preference can express deeper values: across 26 countries, the more progressive tend to prefer Messi, and the more conservative, authoritarian and short-video-consuming, Ronaldo.

Academic 2. Another recent paper measures football’s “leg drain,” the dual-nationality version of brain drain, and finds it flows much like the real thing: wealthy European nations soak up the player value while Africa and the Caribbean bear the heaviest losses.

Explore the interactive charts

• Chart 1 - Footballing strength vs. economic size

• Chart 2 - Memorable footballers per million inhabitants

• Chart 3 - The antiquity of football clubs around the world

• Chart 4 - Club antiquity versus football’s monopoly

Explore more charts

This article features only a selection. On the interactive site, you can browse all the charts from this edition, explore different countries and years, and find additional visualizations on the history of national teams, migration, and the geography of world football.

Explore all the interactive charts

The Atlas — Mapping development from Latin America, issue 3 — June 10th 2026.

The contrast isn’t exclusively Latin American: it also appears on landing in many large African or Asian cities. In European or North American cities, on the other hand, those contrasts exist but rarely imprint themselves so clearly on the map: there is neither such extreme poverty nor a gap between rich and poor that hits the eye so quickly.

Then you get off the plane and the car heads out onto the highway. Out the window, one place gives way to another: the favela, the villa, the invasión, the toma, the barrio — every country has its own word — and almost without transition, sometimes only a few metres away, the sign for a country club or a gated community. Within a few kilometres, households that belong to the world’s poorest 20% live alongside others that belong to the global top 5%.

Any visitor draws the same conclusion that we Latin Americans draw: this is a very unequal region. The statement is correct. The phrase that usually comes next — that it is the most unequal region in the world — is where things start to get slippery.

The ranking that everyone repeats

The idea that Latin America is the world’s most unequal region has been circulating for decades. It appears in reports from international organisations, in academic papers, in popular books and in political speeches of all stripes. But how true is it?

To find out, we’ll use the Gini coefficient, the most common metric for comparing inequality. It runs from 0 to 100: 0 would describe a society where everyone receives exactly the same; 100, one where a single household keeps everything. In practice, when measuring monetary inequality, countries tend to fall between values near 20 (very egalitarian) and values near 70 (extremely unequal).

Let’s look at the global ranking: each bar is a country, and the color indicates the region. Like all charts in The Atlas, it’s interactive: you can filter by region, move the year slider, and download the data.

At first glance, the data confirms the intuition: Latin America has the highest average Gini in the world, at 43.2 points, followed by sub-Saharan Africa at 40.4. That’s where the label “most unequal region” largely comes from.

But here we run into an important complication. International rankings mix two different ways of measuring inequality: some countries measure it based on income (how much each household earns) and others based on consumption (how much they spend). Both measures are reasonable, but they’re not equivalent. Consumption tends to be less concentrated than income, because higher-income households don’t spend everything they earn: they save part of it. So a consumption Gini of 45 doesn’t mean the same thing as an income Gini of 45.

The problem is that regions don’t use the same criterion. Latin America measures almost always by income; Sub-Saharan Africa, almost always by consumption. So when rankings are compared without correction, we’re comparing apples and oranges, and Africa appears artificially more egalitarian. To correct for that bias, we follow a simple conversion used in a World Bank paper: multiply consumption Ginis by 1.13 to bring them closer to income Ginis. It isn’t a universal rule, but it serves as a quick test: what happens to the ranking once we apply this adjustment?

Now the same chart with the correction applied. The podium flips: the Sub-Saharan African average goes from 40.4 to 45.6, while the Latin American average only rises from 43.2 to 44.7, because few countries in the region measure by consumption.

The change is also visible at the top of the ranking. In the unadjusted version, of the twenty most unequal countries in the world, nine are Latin American and eleven are African; in the adjusted version, six are Latin American and fourteen are African. In the top 10, nine are African (almost all of them in the extreme south of the continent — Namibia, Botswana, South Africa). The only Latin American country that remains in that group is Colombia, with a Gini of 54.

So, is Latin America the most unequal region in the world? Strictly speaking, no. But the region is exceptionally unequal for its level of development. Let’s see why.

Too unequal for how rich Latin America is

Let’s go back to the method that will be frequent in this newsletter and that we introduced in the first issue: place each country according to its level of development, measured by GDP per capita, and cross it with the variable that interests us — in this case, the adjusted Gini. As the next chart shows, for various reasons (broader access to education, more progressive tax systems, larger welfare states), richer countries tend to be more egalitarian than poorer ones. The line crossing the chart summarises that global trend: it shows what level of inequality would be expected for each level of development.

Here’s where the distinctive feature of Latin America appears. Every single Latin American country sits above that line. All of them, without exception, are more unequal than their level of development would predict.

In the first issue of The Atlas we introduced the concept of the “residual” to name exactly this: the distance between a country’s observed value and the value its level of development would predict. In inequality, the Latin American residual is the highest on the planet: on average, the region is 17% more unequal than would be expected for its income level. That excess varies within the region: it’s particularly high in Colombia and Brazil, intermediate in Argentina, Chile and Mexico, and milder in Bolivia, Peru and Uruguay.

Even with that heterogeneity, no other region shows such a clear pattern. Sub-Saharan Africa, despite being more unequal than Latin America in absolute terms, doesn’t deviate as far from what its income level predicts: its residual is 7%. At the other end, there are regions that are more egalitarian than would be expected for their development: Europe and Central Asia are 11% more egalitarian; South Asia, 14%.

Put differently: the Latin American exception isn’t in being the most unequal region in the world, but in being too unequal given its intermediate income level. That is, unfortunately, where Latin America is truly exceptional.

Close at the top, far below at the bottom

What does it actually mean for Latin America to be a middle-income region with high inequality? To understand, it helps to look at how income is distributed within each country, decile by decile: the 1st decile is the poorest 10%; the 10th decile, the richest 10%. The next chart shows this for six countries: Norway, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Niger.

Norway combines high incomes with low inequality. Portugal is less wealthy and more unequal than Norway, but richer and more egalitarian than the Latin American average. Argentina, Chile and Brazil are middle-income economies with high inequality (especially Brazil). Niger, in turn, is one of the poorest countries in the world, though less unequal than any country in Latin America.

Let’s start with Chile and Portugal. On average, Portuguese households are 16% richer than Chilean households. But that gap shifts a lot depending on where in the distribution we look. In the 10th decile, Chileans are actually 10% richer than their Portuguese counterparts. In the 1st decile the opposite holds: the poorest 10% in Portugal earn 41% more than the poorest 10% in Chile. In other words: Chilean elites have incomes similar to — even slightly higher than — Portuguese ones; poor Chileans, on the other hand, are clearly worse off than poor Portuguese.

The contrast becomes even sharper when we compare Argentina with Norway. On average, Norway is 3.2 times richer than Argentina. But that difference isn’t distributed evenly across the social pyramid. In the top 10%, Norwegians are “only” 2.2 times richer than their Argentine equivalents; in the bottom 10%, the gap rises to six times. Against Brazil, the contrast is even more brutal: Norwegian elites don’t quite double the income of their Brazilian counterparts, but the poorest Norwegians are nine times richer than the poorest Brazilians.

Put differently: the large gaps between Latin America and Europe are concentrated at the lower end of the social pyramid. Latin American elites don’t live materially far from European ones. Poor Latin Americans, by contrast, live in dramatically worse material conditions than poor Europeans.

The comparison with Niger matters to avoid the opposite misreading: saying that Latin America is very unequal doesn’t mean saying it is a poor region. In every decile, Argentina, Chile and Brazil live much better than Niger. The Latin American pie is much bigger. That’s why, despite high inequality, the region’s poorer households still live materially better than those of an extremely poor but more egalitarian country.

Five living rooms

The numbers describe the pattern, but they don’t show what it looks like in everyday life. That’s what Dollar Street is for: a site that arranges households around the world as if they all lived on the same street — to the left, the world’s poorest; to the right, its richest. Its teams visit families, record their incomes and photograph the objects of their daily lives: the bathroom, the bed, the kitchen, the shoes, the roof, the toys. Walking down Dollar Street is walking through the entire social pyramid. For each of the five households below, we’ll show two positions: their decile within their country and their global percentile — that is, what share of the world’s population lives on less. The interactive chart above lets you explore this country by country.

Let’s take five living rooms.

The photo above shows the living room of a nine-member household in Kenya. The head of the household is 45 and runs a catering business. The house has three bedrooms. They like the neighbourhood; they dislike the snakes. They dream of buying a television. In Kenya, this household belongs to the 8th decile — roughly the country’s upper-middle class.

This photo shows a Brazilian household of two adults and three children, living in a two-bedroom house. The head of the household is 41 and works as a domestic worker. She likes the neighbourhood, but struggles with the lack of water. She wants to buy a fridge and dreams of beds for the children. Their income is similar to that of the Kenyan household above — but in Brazil, they are not upper-middle class: they belong to the poorest 10% of the country.

The previous living room is in Spain, in a one-bedroom ground-floor apartment. The tenant, a 42-year-old physiotherapist, wants to buy a fan and dreams of owning a boat. In Spain, he belongs to the 2nd decile — the poorest 20% of the country. But his income is more than five times that of the Brazilian family and four times that of the Kenyan family. Being at the bottom in Spain looks nothing like being at the bottom in Brazil.

This is a four-room house belonging to a 10th-decile household in Mexico. He is 56 and works as a hotel manager; she is a housewife. There is running water inside the home, though sometimes they still have to fetch it from a fifteen-minute walk away. They go on holiday often; they have even made it as far as Alaska. They want to buy a car and dream of starting their own business.

The last living room is in Denmark, in a four-bedroom house belonging to a 10th-decile household. The head of the household is 41 and works as a teacher. She lives with her two children. She likes the house because it is spacious and close to work, though the noise from the avenue bothers her. Their next major expense will be a family trip. They dream of having a tree house.

Let’s compare the last two. On average, Mexican household incomes are four times smaller than Danish ones. But the gap between the elites of one country and the other is considerably smaller than the gap between national averages. Mexicans in the 10th decile live closer to Danes in the 10th decile than poor Mexicans live to poor Danes. What changes drastically isn’t the top of the social pyramid: it’s the bottom.

What to take away

Three points are worth keeping in mind.

First: Latin America is not the most unequal region in the world in absolute terms. Once we correct for the difference between measuring income and measuring consumption, sub-Saharan Africa is the most unequal. But that clarification doesn’t make the Latin American case any less important; it makes it more precise. Latin America’s exceptionality lies elsewhere: the region is 17% more unequal than its level of development would predict — more than any other region. Put differently: Latin America is too unequal for how rich it is.

Second: that exceptionality isn’t an abstract statistical figure. Its consequences are felt most sharply at the bottom. Latin American elites don’t live materially far from European ones; the large distance appears when we compare the poor of one side to the poor of the other. That’s where the combination that defines the region becomes visible: middle-income countries with high inequality. That’s why Latin America can contain, within just a few kilometres, social worlds that are extremely far apart: households belonging to the world’s poorest 20% and others belonging to the world’s richest 5%. In Latin America, rich and poor often live close to one another. But that does not mean they live together.

Third: all of this matters because inequality isn’t just a statistical gap. It’s an architecture of everyday life. It organises schools, neighbourhoods, hospitals, transport, safety, free time, expectations and possible futures. The inequality we see from the plane looks like landscape, but it is history: it was produced, sustained, inherited. That distance will not close on its own. But it does not have to remain the same forever.

Recommendations

If you want to keep exploring the topic:

(a) Visual. Unequal Scenes, by Johnny Miller. A photographic project on urban inequality seen from above. Miller portrays cities where rich and poor neighbourhoods coexist a few metres apart, separated by avenues, walls, motorways, or just by the shape of the urban fabric. What this issue describes in words, Miller shows in images.

(b) Academic, regional. The CEDLAS website (Centre for Distributive, Labour and Social Studies, at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina), which gathers a remarkable amount of research on inequality in Latin America.

(c) Academic, global. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, by Branko Milanovic (Harvard University Press, 2016). An essential book for understanding how the global distribution of income has shifted in recent decades, and for placing Latin America within that wider map.

(d) Audiovisual. “1955 vs 2025, who actually had it better?”. An exceptionally well-produced mid-length feature by journalist Johnny Harris on how inequality has evolved in the United States over the past several decades.

Explore the interactive charts

• Chart 1 — World inequality ranking

• Chart 2 — Inequality vs. GDP per capita

• Chart 3 — Distribution by decile, country comparison

The Atlas — Mapping development from Latin America, issue 2 — May 26th 2026.

He is not alone in noticing this. Foreigners who spend time in Latin America tend to come away with some version of the same observation — that social life here operates differently, that friendships form faster, that people seem more present. Back in the region, we tend to wave it away with a label: Latin warmth, Latin passion, as if naming it were enough to explain it. But the observation isn’t just an impression. It shows up in the data. Latin Americans report, survey after survey, broader and denser personal networks than most of the world. And not only that: they are also, consistently, among the happiest people on the planet.

I’m writing this from a small café next to the train tracks in Coghlan, a quiet neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The station opened in 1891 and takes its name from John Coghlan, an Irish engineer who spent thirty years building public infrastructure in Argentina. The iron footbridge that still crosses the tracks was manufactured in Glasgow, shipped piece by piece, and assembled here. The whole place is a small monument to a moment when Argentina was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and attracted capital and engineering talent from Europe.

This afternoon, a few meters from where I’m sitting, parents and grandparents are watching an outdoor film screening near the platform. Teenagers are playing soccer on a concrete lot across the tracks while their mothers share mate — a bitter herbal drink passed around in a gourd — on a bench. Two friends embrace when they greet each other. A couple leans against a tree.

And yet. Every shop I passed on the way here had rolled its metal shutter to the floor. The ones still open have a folded security gate mounted above the door, ready to drop. On the corner, a hardware store displays a laminated sign: “PROSEGUR. CONNECTED TO CENTRAL ALARM SYSTEM.” A European visitor would notice this immediately — back home, closed shops show their interiors through plain glass, no grilles, no visible alarms. Here, a business that closes for the night fortifies itself.

Warmth and armor, ten meters apart. Latin America, in one scene.

There’s also a small trap hidden in the scene. Coghlan — the Irish name, the railway, the architecture of some of the older houses — reads like a neighborhood built by English immigrants. It wasn’t: the first settlers were predominantly Basque French. First impressions and data don’t always agree. A lot of what gets said about Latin America works exactly like that: it sounds right, it’s roughly plausible, and it falls apart when you look at the numbers carefully.

* * *

The method

There is a basic tool in comparative development analysis that readers of this newsletter will encounter often: take GDP per capita — the most widely used measure of development across countries — on the horizontal axis, and any variable you like — happiness, homicides, inequality, education, life expectancy — on the vertical. Each country is a dot. With enough countries, the dots form a cloud, and through that cloud you can draw a line that summarizes the general trend. That line is a prediction: given a country’s income, how much of the indicator would you expect it to have? Countries that fall on the line are predictable. Those that fall above or below are outliers, residuals — the part of a country’s behavior that income alone cannot explain.

Latin America, seen through this kind of chart, is a peculiar case. Not because it’s poor — it isn’t. The region’s income per capita is close to the global average, comparable to economies like China, the Western Balkans, or Southeast Asia: far from Europe and the United States, but also far from sub-Saharan Africa, today the world’s poorest region. But being close to the global average in income doesn’t mean being average in everything else. Across many variables, Latin America shows up where nobody would expect it, and not by accident. Sometimes well above the line, sometimes well below. There are persistent patterns that make the region hard to read if you stick to a single indicator.

One clarification before we go further: “Latin America” is a convenient but misleading label. Inside it coexist Uruguay and Honduras, Chile and Haiti, Costa Rica and Venezuela. The internal differences are sometimes as large as the differences with any other region in the world. When the regional average tells one story and the individual countries tell another, this newsletter will tell both. The region as a whole is a starting point, not a destination.

Let’s start with two examples — the two sides of that scene in Coghlan.

* * *

The happiness residual

Every year since 2012, Gallup and the University of Oxford have published the World Happiness Report: a ranking of subjective wellbeing — what we commonly call happiness — built from surveys in more than 140 countries. The core question is the Cantril ladder, named after American psychologist Hadley Cantril, who designed it in the late 1950s. It goes roughly like this: “Imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 to 10. The top represents the best possible life for you; the bottom, the worst. Which step do you feel you’re standing on today?” The basic theory says richer countries should answer higher. And broadly speaking, that’s true. But Latin America breaks the pattern.

In the latest edition, published a few weeks ago and covering the average for 2023–2025, Costa Rica ranked fourth — the first time a developing country has ever reached that position — just behind Finland, Iceland, and Denmark, despite a GDP per capita barely a third of the United States. Mexico came in 12th, ahead of Australia and Germany. Uruguay ranked above Italy, Spain, and France. Argentina, despite its chronic crises, finished above Japan and South Korea. The pattern is robust: it appears year after year, in this survey and in others. If income per capita were all that mattered, Latin America should be considerably less happy than it reports. The phenomenon even has a name in the academic literature: the Latin American happiness paradox. It deserves — and will get — its own issue.

Let’s look at the chart. Each dot is a country; the brown dots are Latin American countries and the other colors indicate the rest of the world’s regions. To explore the details country by country, click on the chart. With the exception of Haiti — whose situation is exceptional even within the region — every Latin American country falls above the regression line: happier than its income would predict. On average, Latin American countries score 0.6 points higher on the 0–10 scale than the model would expect. That’s a lot. The gap is particularly wide in Central America and in Brazil and Mexico. In the Southern Cone — Argentina, Chile, Uruguay — the positive residual is also there, but more moderate. In every other region of the world, countries are scattered on both sides of the line. Only in Latin America are almost all of them on the same side.

* * *

The violence residual

The second chart is darker. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime publishes global homicide statistics periodically. The world average hovers around 5.2 per 100,000 inhabitants — the latest figure available, for 2023. Latin America and the Caribbean comes in at roughly 19.7: nearly four times the global mean. Eight of the ten countries with the world’s highest homicide rates are in the region. And as the chart shows, almost without exception, Latin America falls on the wrong side of the line: at equal income per capita, Latin Americans are murdered at far higher rates than the rest of the world.

These are not numbers from a bad year. They persist across decades, across political cycles, across left-wing and right-wing governments, across periods of growth and stagnation. In every single year of the 21st century, Latin America and the Caribbean has recorded between three and four times more homicides than the global average, with nearly all of its countries consistently above that average. This is not a conjunctural problem. It is structural.

Within the region, there are important differences. In recent years, my country, Argentina, has had one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America — lower than the United States and, for some years now, below the global average as well. But that figure, which might seem reassuring, is still four times the Western European mean. The Latin American floor is higher than the European ceiling.

The homicide rate is probably the region’s most extreme and most stubborn negative outlier. And it is not trivial that it coexists with the happiness residual: the same continent that reports some of the highest life satisfaction scores in the world also has some of the highest homicide rates in the world. Any theory of development that claims to explain Latin America has to be able to sit with that contradiction.

* * *

An exceptional region

Put the two residuals together — more happiness than expected, more homicides than expected — and an image starts to take shape. Latin America is a strange animal: a region that embraces more and kills more than its level of development would predict, and that hasn’t quite come to terms with either.

That is what this newsletter will explore, issue by issue: why the region is more unequal than its level of development would predict, why it urbanized before it got rich, why it produces too few engineers and scientists, why it produces soccer stars by the dozen but wins surprisingly few Olympic medals, why it put women into parliaments faster than Europe did, why it has cleaner electricity grids than several wealthy countries.

What is the point of understanding what makes Latin America exceptional? Not to replace the basic development agenda — growth and poverty reduction remain urgent — but to sharpen it. To learn to distinguish which of our residuals need to be reversed — violence, distrust in institutions, inequality — and which deserve to be protected — the density of social bonds, the improbable happiness. In Coghlan, the security shutters and the embraces coexist ten meters apart. This newsletter exists to understand why. Because perhaps understanding Latin American development starts there: by learning to read, in a single scene, what still holds us together and what still holds us back.

Explore the interactive charts

→ Subjective wellbeing vs. GDP per capita

→ Homicide rate vs. GDP per capita

→ Homicides over time: Latin America vs. the world

The Atlas — Mapping development from Latin America, issue 1 — May 2026.