Record holders in the number of participations at the World Championship. Who has a chance to make history in Qatar?

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar will be the twenty-second World Cup in football history. Just one participation in a World Cup is already highly valued in a footballer’s life. But across the statistics there are also players who have been lucky enough to feature at this footballing feast several times. At the very top of this table are three players who count five World Cup appearances. Will anyone else join them in Qatar?

The legendary Mexican goalkeeper of the 1950s and 1960s, Antonio Carbajal, was the first ever footballer to count a fifth World Cup appearance.

The Mexican goalkeeper has participated in every World Cup since 1950 in Brazil, 1954 in Switzerland, 1958 in Sweden and at the 1962 championship in Chile, he netted Mexico’s first ever World Cup win over later silver medal winning Czechoslovakia.

Carbajal’s last appearance at the 1966 World Cup was in England. Sadly, at the end of his career, Carbajal was not able to say goodbye at home at the next championship in 1970 in his native Mexico.

It was then a wait of more than thirty years for another player to play in five championships. German midfielder Lothar Matthäus completed the tally at the 1998 French championship.

It must be said that Matthäus’s championships were more than once crowned with success. At his first World Cup in 1982 in Spain, he took silver when the Germans lost to the Italians in the final. The legendary midfielder also brought home silver in 1986 from Mexico, where the Germans fell to the Argentines.

Four years later, however, the Germans and Matthäus lived to see the final of the championship in Italy, when they came back from defeat against the Argentinians to celebrate the title of world champions. The German representative then added two more participations. In 1994 in the USA, the Germans were stopped in the quarter-finals by the Bulgarians, and four years later in France a similar quarter-final scenario was repeated with the Croatians.

So far, the third footballer in history who managed to collect a fifth participation at the last World Cup in Russia is another Mexican, Rafael Márquez. The long-time Mexican captain has been a regular participant in the championships since 2002, i.e. the World Cup in Japan and South Korea.

Under Márquez, the Mexicans have advanced out of the group stage at all five championships, while it has always been the ceiling. Rafael Márquez and Mexico have never reached the quarter-finals of the World Championships.

One more player could be added to the possible list of participants, which is none other than Italian legend Gianluigi Buffon. Buffon too has been to five championships, but he didn’t start in goal at the first ever one in France 1998. So his record cannot be taken as complete.

Among the still active footballers we can find four players in waiting who could theoretically and potentially also join this exclusive club in Qatar in a year’s time.

And they are all very well-known names. The national teams of Argentina or Spain are already certain to participate in the World Cup in Qatar, and Lionel Messi and Sergio Ramos, who have been regulars since 2006, have a great chance.

Mexico’s Andrés Guardado or Cristiano Ronaldo with Portugal also have a chance to play in Qatar. For Guardado and Ronaldo, the 2006 World Cup in Germany was also their first. Neither of them, however, is yet guaranteed to participate in Qatar with their team.

While Mexico, a regular qualifier, can be expected to secure its place at the World Cup in the spring, Portugal will have to go through a tough barrage. Ronaldo will face Turkey in the semi-finals and the better of the pair of Northern Macedonia and Italy in the eventual final.

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