Some interesting World Cup stats

Arsenal donated players to no fewer than 11 competing nations. That’s more than a third of the teams in Germany and must be a record. Space is too short here to list them all, but it is easy to count them up yourself. All are fairly prominent Premiership players with the exception of the two who have not played for Arsenal yet.

Number of Brazilian coaches in the competition: five (if you include the Costa Rican, who was born in Brazil). Number of Dutch coaches in the competition: four. Number of coaches from former Yugoslavia: four. Number of French coaches: three. Germans: two. Argentines: two. Swedes: two. Number of English coaches: none.

Number of Dutch coaches going home empty-handed: None. Even Leo Beenhakker, in charge of the tiniest nation ever to compete in the World Cup finals, took a highly creditable point from Sweden. Number of Dutch coaches through to the knockout stages: Two. Number of coaches England missed out on through to knockout stages: Two. But don’t worry. Steve McClaren’s still around, too.

From Paul Wilson, The Observer

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