The languages of sport
Every club mapped to the first language of the state it plays in.
Data as of 1 Nov 2026 · 19 leagues, 368 clubs · CLDR 49, Glottolog 5.3, States sheet
Premier League
Each club beside the first language of the state it plays in, with the census share where there is one.
How this is measured
A club is matched to the state of its metro. Where a state has no census language figure, the share shows a dash and the word label, and the language is the state's first language by label. English reach is the share of the state able to hold a conversation in English.
Every league at a glance
How many first languages each league's clubs play in, most varied first.
Where these numbers come from
Each club takes the first language of its state from the States sheet, with the census share from the state's census (home language, mother tongue or knowledge of a language, as the country reports it). Club and metro details come from the site's team metadata. See Method.
Ligue 1 is left out: only 1 of 18 clubs resolve; states.json has no rows for the league's country.
- Unicode CLDR territoryInfo (release 49) (Unicode License v3). Country-level language shares, official status and Tier 3 reach (populationPercent is total speakers, first plus second language).
- Glottolog 5.3 (CC BY 4.0). Language names, ISO 639-3 codes, families.
- Database of International and Intranational Linguistic distances (DICL v2), USITC (CC BY 4.0). Country-pair common spoken language and linguistic proximity (neighbours, linked-world score, pairs pages).
- States (ISO 3166-2) sheet, MetroAreas workbook (Citizen of Nowhere, own compilation). States, populations and the four language labels per state.
- Natural Earth 1:110m Admin 0 Countries (nvkelso/natural-earth-vector) (Public domain). World outline for the language maps (world-110m.geojson, properties reduced to iso3 and name).
- Country layer of this site (countries.json workbook population, World Bank iso2 and iso3, OWID country-population) (Citizen of Nowhere, own compilation; World Bank CC BY 4.0; OWID CC BY). Country population, iso2 and /countries slug joined onto languages, countries and families (speakers = share x population).