Around 2/3rd of the 48 teams that qualified for the ongoing World Cup final rounds are high-income or upper-middle-income economies. Roughly 1/3rd are lower-middle-income or low-income economies.
Economists who tend to poke their noses into the Beautiful Game have long sought to find a relationship between income - both aggregate or GDP, or average per capita - of economies and their performance in the highest level of international competitive football.
