Messi Magic: Left-Footedness in Professional Soccer Players

In the final of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the Argentinean soccer team beat the French team with 4 to 2 goals after penalties (3 to 3 after the regular game). The Argentinean forward, Lionel Messi, won the player of the game trophy after scoring twice for the Argentinean squad during regular playtime. The game was considered one of the best of all time by many soccer fans around the world.

Interestingly, Lionel Messi is well known for being a left-footed player (see here), which is rather rare. As most people are right-footed, facing a left-footed player can be tricky for a goalkeeper since the shooting angle of the forward may be unexpected. But how rare or common is left-footedness in professional soccer players really? Let us have a look at the scientific data!

Left-footedness in professional soccer players

One of the most famous scientific studies on left-footedness in professional soccer players focused on data from the Soccer World Cup 1998 in France (Carey et al., 2002). In the study, the scientists looked at videos of games from the World Cup and analyzed left- and right-foot use in 236 players from 16 different teams. The scientists looked at different situations in which the players would touch the ball with their feet, such as shots at the goal, dribbles, passes, free kicks, corner kicks, and penalty kicks. More than 19,000 individual contacts with the ball were included in the analysis, making for a substantial database.

Overall, about 79 percent of players were right-footed and about 21 percent were left-footed. Only very few players were mixed-footed, e.g., played the ball equally often with both of their feet. Interestingly, while almost all players strongly preferred one foot over the other, they tended to be equally skilled with their non-preferred foot compared to when they needed to use it.

Is left-footedness more common in professional soccer players than in regular people?

If being left-footed represents an advantage for a professional soccer player because they are able to play the ball more surprisingly, one could think that there would be more left-footed soccer pros than regular people who are left-footed.

So is the percentage of left-footed soccer players higher than that of left-footed people in the general population?

A large-scale meta-analysis of 164 studies on footedness (Packheiser et al., 2020) reported that about 12.1 percent out of more than 140,000 participants in these studies were left-footed. Thus, with 21 percent left-footers among them, professional soccer players are a little more likely to be left-footed than regular people, but not much.