Dispersed origins, concentrated professional entry and limited positional patterning in Colombian men's international football, 1962-2026

This repository contains the coded documentary dataset and reproducible materials supporting an observational historical study of the geographical origins, professional-debut locations and playing-position patterns of Colombia’s senior men’s international footballers. The database comprises 611 player–tournament records and 306 unique players selected across 27 FIFA World Cup and Copa América/South American Championship final tournaments between 1962 and 2026. Public biographical and sporting records were triangulated; 264 unique players met the two-source birthplace-verification standard and 174 met the two-source professional-debut standard. The repository includes the complete coded workbook and codebook, documentary source and adjudication fields, tournament and duplicate audits, DANE regional classifications, 1985 census denominators, departmental-rate data, historical-period summaries, and a Python script that reproduces the principal descriptive and inferential results. Birthplace is not treated as place of development, and professional debut is interpreted as an institutional entry point rather than a complete developmental history. The data do not identify causal mechanisms, migration timing, youth-development sites or individual ethnicity. Departmental rates use a common 1985 census denominator and are descriptive rather than cohort-matched probabilities.