The World Cup is one of the biggest prizes in football, but many players, regardless of their skill, have little to no chance of winning it. This is because winning the world comes with the luck of the draw. If you’re skilled enough, you can attract a top club and win some of the biggest prizes in club football. But the World Cup is an international prize, so what country you are born in, or at least affiliated with by virtue of your parents, matters.
As for the club that has produced the most World Cup winners, it has to be a club who can attract a lot of players from successful international sides. So, unsurprisingly, only the top clubs are in contention.
Bayern Munich come really close to being the winners here with 24 internationals. Among these are Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller, Sepp Maier and Paul Breitner, who won the World Cup with West Germany in 1974.
Jorginho won it with Brazil in 1994, while Manuel Neuer, Philipp Lahm, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Thomas Muller, Toni Kroos, Mario Gotze and Jerome Boateng were part of the German contingent in 2014. The club’s most recent winner is Frenchman Corentin Tolisso, who lifted it in 2018.
Inter Milan are another club in contention, with Lautaro Martinez, their most recent winner for Argentina in 2022, taking the number to 20. You may remember Marco Materazzi with Italy in 2006, and of course the unforgettable Ronaldo in 2002. He won the World Cup twice, the first year being in 1994. But only the second time was as an Inter player.
The winners are Juventus with 27 internationals, three ahead of Bayern. The most successful tournament for players registered with the club that most readers will remember might be Italy’s 2006 triumph. Gianluigi Buffon, Fabio Cannavaro, Alessandro Del Piero, Mauro Camoranesi and Gianluca Zambrotta were all Juventus players when they won it.
More recently, Blaise Matuidi won the 2018 World Cup with France, and Angel Di Maria and Leandro Paredes were actually Juventus players when they lifted the trophy with Argentina in Qatar in 2022. Both had joined the club earlier that summer, and the World Cup was played in the winter, with the final on 18 December. Paredes scored the penultimate penalty in the shootout against France.
Interestingly, if the tournament had been played in the summer as usual, then only Di Maria will have added to the number, since he joined as a free agent early in the summer, while Paredes did not join the club until the end of August, on loan from Paris Saint-Germain.
