René Westerhausen

Tag: famous left-handers

  • Left-Handed Footballers at the FIFA World Cup 2026

    Left-Handed Footballers at the FIFA World Cup 2026

    The tactical demand for left‑footed players should, in theory, lead to a higher proportion of left-handed footballers at the FIFA World Cup 2026 – yet, left-handers are surprisingly scarce among the left-footed players.

    The football World Cup is upon us again, and I have to admit that I have a mild football fever these days. I like to watch the occasional match, and the other night, while waiting for the match between France and Senegal to kick off, I found myself scrolling through some random clips of the French national team. What I saw was not really surprising. Just the typical “football stuff”. Players sprinting, kicking, shooting, celebrating, followed by taking selfies with fans or trophies.

    Then, I came across a scene featuring Ousmane Dembélé, the central forward of L’équipe tricolore. In the clip, one could see the football star sitting at some gala event, wearing a fine suite, while a football jersey bearing his name was nicely draped on a table in front of him. He was supposed to sign it and so he took hold of a felt‑pen with his his left-hand and graced the jersey with his autograph.

    That Ousmane Dembélé prefers to write with his left hand is not remarkable in itself. With around 12% of men being left‑handed [1], any starting line-up of eleven players – at the World Cup or anywhere else – should statistically include about one left‑handed player. And in a sport that mainly revolves around kicking a ball with one’s feet, a player’s handedness should anyway be largely irrelevant, right?

    Yet, when I tried to find pictures of the other players of the French squad signing jerseys, fans, or contracts, I came across a curious accumulation of left-handers. Besides Dembélé, also Kylian Mbappé, Adrien Rabiot, Lucas Hernandez, Lucas Digne, Rayan Cherki, and the goalkeeper Brice Samba apparently prefer to use their left hand, suggesting that 7 out of the 26 strong squad – so, roughly 27% – are likely left-handers, more than doubling the expected value of 12%.

    With such a small sample, it could easily be a coincidence – and maybe that is where I should have left it. But this finding stuck with me, and I even came up with a little hypothesis concerning the reason for this accumulation of left-handers.

    Handedness is strongly associated with “footedness”, in that left‑handers are more likely to prefer their left foot while the vast majority of right‑handers favour their right [2]. To add some numbers: it can be estimated that roughly 60% of all left‑footed individuals should be left‑handed [3]. So, should there be any tactical demand for recruiting more left-footed players, this should – as a side effect – also increase the number of left-handers in a squad.

    With which foot a player prefers to “handle” the ball is obviously very relevant in football. It affects the footballer’s playing style, the angles of the passes and shots, or the preferred movement patterns on the pitch. It also may determine the player’s positioning. Left-footed players preferably occupy positions on the left-side of the pitch, and team managers actively search for left-footed players to fill out these positions. If you pay close attention at the World Cup matches, you will find that virtually all left-backs – so those playing on the left side of the defence line viewed from the goalkeeper – are left-footed players. In case of the French squad these are, for example, Lucas Hernandez and Lucas Digne; two of the left-handers mentioned earlier.

    Ousmane Dembélé’s footedness is, by the way, a bit more complicated. In a rather remarkable interview early in his career, Dembélé was asked about his preferred foot. His answer was that he was left-footed. Apparently not entirely satisfied with this answer, the journalist inquired why he then shoots penalties with his right foot – as he indeed does as can be seen in the featured image above. Dembélé replied: “Because I shoot better with my right foot.” Maybe this is also the reason why the webpages tracking the careers of professional footballers, such as transfermarkt.com, inform us that he is “both” footed. Or, should we just take his word for it and classify him as left-footed?

    In any case, left- and both-footedness is far less common in the general population than right-footedness. Estimates suggests that only about 15 to 20% of men fall into this category [2]. When it comes to football, however, this percentage is nowhere near sufficient. Given the tactical systems most teams employ today, squads typically need three to four capable left‑footed players – around 27% to 36% of the starting line-up – to adequately cover all positions on the left side of the pitch. So, there seems to be a mismatch between the demand for left-footed footballers and the supply of naturally left-footed individuals. As a result, left‑footed players are well sought after, and there are indications for a selection bias in their favour already in young ages [4].

    Also at this year’s world cup, the proportion of left‑footed players exceeds what one would expect based on the general population. A quick scan of the full squads of the top-ten teams of the FIFA‑World ranking, finds that 80 left- or both-footed footballers in the total 260 nominated players, so roughly 31 percent [5]. As can be seen in the Figure below, Brazil (11 of 26, or 42%) and Argentina (10 of 26, or 38%) are topping this unofficial left-footedness ranking, but all but two teams show a comparatively high incidence of left-footedness. Only in the English (19%) and the Dutch squad (15%) the proportion of left-footed players is in the “normal”, that is, the expected range.

    Graph showing that Brazil and Argentina have most left-footed players in their ranks
    Left-footedness and handedness of the top-ranked teams at the FIFA World Cup 2026. The footedness information was taken from transfermarkt.com; handedness was determined by finding pictures of the players signing autographs. Left-handed footballers who prefer the left foot, are unexpectedly rare. (Data source: transfermarkt.com, background image from https://pixnio.com/)

    Coming back to my earlier hypothesis, the question is whether this high rate of left-footed players also results in an increase in left-handers? The answer is: apparently not! I was able to track down pictures or clips showing 255 of the 260 players of the ten top-teams while writing, and 30 of them were doing so with the left hand – notably including the better known stars Kevin De Bruyne, Joshua Kimmich, Alejandro Grimaldo, or Jordan Pickford [6]. However, this only made for 11.8% of all players, which is arguably very close to the expected 12% left-handers among men. So, no excessive amount of left-handed footballers at the World Cup!

    Before wrapping up this excursion into the world of football, I could not resist taking another look at the relationship between handedness and footedness – and, to my surprise, left-handers were astonishingly rare among the left‑footed players. As the graph above shows, both Brazil and Argentina field sizeable groups of left‑footed players, yet each squad includes only a single left-hander. Even more striking, none of the nine left‑footed players on Belgium’s team appears to be left‑handed. Added up across all ten teams, 22 out of the 80 left- or both-footed players (28%) were left-handers: just about half of the 60% percent that could be reasonably expected [3].

    It is difficult to say what might have caused this lack of left-handers among the left-footed players. The general need for left-footed players could have forced some right-footed right-handers at young age to practise their left foot to be able to occupy the positions on the left side of the pitch, so that they today appear left-footed. Conversely, many of the left‑footed right‑handers could be natural left‑handers who were retrained to write with their right hand at home or in school. However, the practise of retraining has luckily gone out of fashion in most countries and should not really have affected this generation of players which is born – or at least mostly raised – in the 21st century.

    It seems the French squad – including Ousmane Dembélé – is just an outlier when it comes to left‑handed footballers, and my intuitive hypothesis turned out to be one of these misguided attempts of making sense of insufficient data. Among the top‑teams, there are indeed more left‑ or both‑footed players than expected, but this does not translate into a noticeable increase in left‑handedness at the FIFA World Cup 2026.

    [1] The incidence of left-handedness is about 2% higher in men compared with women, so roughly 12%; see Papadatou-Pastou, M. et al. (2020). Human handedness: A meta-analysis. Psychol. Bulletin, 146, 481-524. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000229

    [2] Packheiser, J., Schmitz, J., Berretz, G., Carey, D. P., Paracchini, S., Papadatou-Pastou, M., & Ocklenburg, S. (2020). Four meta-analyses across 164 studies on atypical footedness prevalence and its relation to handedness. Scientific Reports, 10, 14501. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71478-w

    [3] Even when factoring in that right‑handers outnumber left‑handers nine to one, the pattern still suggests that left‑footed individuals should, in principle, be left‑handed more often than right‑handed. According to the data from [2] of 100 men, about 12 should be left-handers of which 66% should be left-footed, so about 8 individuals. Of the 88 right-handers, 6% should be left-footed, so, roughly 5. Left-handed left-footers should outnumber right-handed left-footers 8 to 5 – in percentage, about 60% of all left-footed individuals should also be left-handers

    [4] Verbeek, J., Elferink-Gemser, M. T., Jonker, L., Huijgen, B. C., & Visscher, C. (2017). Laterality related to the successive selection of Dutch national youth soccer players. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(22), 2220-2224. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2016.1262544

    [5] I extracted the data from transfermarkt.com; of note “both”-footedness is rarely reported, so I kept them together with left-footedness for simplicity

    [6] Of the total 260 players, Kevin De Bruyne, Joshua Kimmich, and Kylian Mbappé are three of only eight left-handed footballers who are right-footed.

  • Sinister Muppets: Why Miss Piggy and Kermit are Left-Handers

    Sinister Muppets: Why Miss Piggy and Kermit are Left-Handers

    The post explores the reasons for why most of Jim Henson’s muppets are left-handers.

    Browsing the catalogue of my favourite online library, I came across a book entitled Celebrated Left-Handers [1], which promised fabulous facts about these famous lefties. Curious as I am about all matters of handedness, I was intrigued and began leafing through the pages.

    The book, published in 1999, was structured like a calendar. For each day of the year, it introduced a notable left-hander born on that date. There were many actors, sport stars, and various heads of various states, including a couple of U.S. presidents. I quickly realised, though, that the book was not always correct, as it featured a few – let’s say – honourable left‑handers, who almost certainly are right-handers. The then-prince-now-king Charles III of the United Kingdom, is one such example. The author apparently considered these celebrities important enough to grant them a place of honour among the genuine left‑handers.

    One other of these supposed “lefties” can be found as entry on the 24th of September: Jim Henson, the American puppeteer. Should his name not immediately “ring a bell”, you will very likely recognise one or two of his creations, those anarchic characters Henson lovingly called muppets. You have likely encountered them in shows like Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. The stars of these shows, like Ernie and Bert, Kermit the Frog, or Miss Piggy, have left a lasting impression well-beyond children’s TV, and you might well have encountered them in other branches of popular culture .

    Henson was, however, very likely a right-hander. He wrote and drew with his right hand and he, as you will see in a moment, controlled this puppets the way right-handers typically do. Although Henson certainly deserves to be mentioned in any book on celebrated people, the inclusion in this book on left-handers was very likely a mistake.

    There were, nevertheless, a couple of lines in the paragraphs describing his work and life that caught my attention, as it suggested that one of his creations might well be a left-hander. It reads [2]:

    “One of the earliest and most popular Muppets was … Kermit the Frog, who eventually became a kind of alter ego for the low‑key and essentially introverted Henson. Kermit was, like his creator, left‑handed.”

    My curiosity was tickled, and I could not help but diving a bit deeper into this claim. I had to study Kermit’s handedness. So, rekindling my childhood fascination for Henson’s shows, I rewatch countless clips of Kermit acting on Sesame Street and in The Muppet Show – and indeed, it was true. Kermit clearly preferred his left hand, or whatever the frog equivalent of a hand his called by biologists. I found him holding micro- and telephones, pressing buttons, and even smashing cakes – always favouring his left hand. And during his iconic banjo routines, he strummed away with that same left hand leading the show.

    And, to my surprise, Kermit was not the only leftie on the cast of these shows. Rather, most muppets seem to prefer their left hand. Bert, Ernie, the Count, Grover, Cookie Monster, Beaker, Floyd, Janice, Statler and Waldorf, all the characters I remembered from my childhood, turned out to be left-handers. Even Miss Piggy, the resident diva of the Muppet Show. You can watch her acting out her temperament, regularly hitting Kermit and other with her devastating left-hand swing.

    As lively as Henson’s creations appear on screen, they are obviously just glove puppets. They are brought to live by the hands of various human puppeteers. And, it is not a very daring prediction to make that the Muppet’s left-handedness is, in one way or the other, reflecting the hand preference of these puppeteers.

    So, I had to look at the puppeteers. As said, Henson was a right-hander, and so were most in his team. For example, Frank Oz, is a right-hander. He played among other the muppets Bert and Miss Piggy, and, by the way, also worked on the original Star Wars movies. Yes, in Yoda, his hand he had. And it turns out that right-handed puppeteers, like Oz and Henson, typically prefer to wear the glove puppet on their dominant right hand [3].

    The picture below, which was taken at the recording of the Sesame Street, nicely illustrates this. On the left, you can see Frank Oz controlling Bert, the yellow fellow, who is a type of a glove-and-rod puppet. The glove part is the head of Bert, which is here operated by Oz with his right hand stuck in the puppet’s back. This leaves Oz’s left hand free to operate the rods or sticks controlling the hand and arm movements of the puppet. As Bert’s left hand is closer to Oz’s free left hand, Oz naturally prefers to use the left hand of Bert when interacting with the props or when gesticulating, making Bert appear to be a left-hander.

    Frank Oz, Jim Henson, and Daniel Seagren operating the puppets Bert and Ernie
    The puppeteers Frank Oz, Daniel Seagren, and Jim Henson (from left to right) operating the puppets Bert (left) and Ernie (right) on the set of Sesame Street, 1970. Photographer: Charlotte Brooks (Source: Look magazine photograph collection; Library of Congress, https://lccn.loc.gov/2025160319)

    Similarly, on the right side, we see Jim Henson controlling Ernie, the orange chap. Ernie is a slightly different type of puppet than Bert as his hands are not controlled by rods. Rather he is a live-hand puppet, and has two gloves as hands, significantly increasing his manual dexterity compared with Bert, but also, as seen in the picture, requiring a second puppeteer when actions of both hands are required. So, Henson controls Ernie’s head with his right hand, while wearing a second glove representing the muppet’s left hand on his own left hand. Ernie’s right hand, in turn, is controlled by the second puppeteer wearing the glove – a process fittingly called right handing in the trade – which here is done by Daniel Seagren. Nevertheless, since Henson is the lead puppeteer of Ernie, it will naturally be him who leads the manual acting with his and Ernie’s left hand.

    So, it appears, Henson’s muppets – and likely most other glove puppets – end up as left-handers simply because the nervous systems controlling them are usually right-handers. Right-handed puppeteers animate left-handed puppets.

    Of course, not all people are right-handed, and the occasional left-handed puppeteer should animate right‑handed puppets. And, indeed, this seems to be the case. Louise Gold was one such puppeteer on The Muppet Show. She played various characters including the recurring Annie Sue – Miss Piggy’s younger pig rival. Gold used her left hand to control Annie Sue’s head and her right hand to guide the arm rods. Annie Sue accordingly turned out to be a right-handed muppet.

    These observations enable us to speculate about the handedness of the muppets and puppets seen as a population. About 10% of the human population are left-handers [4], and there is no reason to doubt that puppeteers are somewhat representative for this population and exhibit a similar incidence rate of left handedness. The muppets controlled by these left-handers will likely appear right-handed, while the other 90% will typically turn out to be left-handed. In other words, in muppets right-handers are probably as infrequent as left-handers are among us humans.

    Henson’s muppets, as most other puppets, are caricatures, accentuating our human quirks, anxieties, and peculiarities in their acting. Watching their shows, offers us a mirror, in which we can recognise ourselves or people we know. And, as for any proper mirror, left and right are also confused here, and most puppets appear left-handers.

    [1] Rutledge, L. W. (1999). Celebrated left-handers: Fabulous facts about famous southpaws. NY: MJF Books. [https://archive.org/details/celebratedleftha00]

    [2] Ibid, p. 214

    [3] Freeman, S. (2007). How Muppets Work, HowStuffWorks.com. Retrieved 6. April 2026 [https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/muppet.htm; archived here]

    [4] Papadatou-Pastou, M. et al. (2020). Human handedness: A meta-analysis. Psychol. Bulletin, 146, 481-524. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000229