[La Liga] Average Height Ranking — All 20 Clubs on Their Opening Day 2026-27

The 2026-27 La Liga season kicked off on 15 August 2026. For this piece we took the eleven players each club sent out for its first league match of the campaign and worked out their average height. We deliberately left the substitutes out: the eleven names on the teamsheet at kick-off are the clearest statement a manager makes about the physical profile he wants to start a season with. The conditions are identical to our Premier League, Eredivisie and J1 pieces.

One caveat. La Liga's opening round did not fit into a single weekend. The first match was Alavés against Getafe on 15 August, but Osasuna did not play until 24 August — ten days later — and in the meantime Sevilla, Espanyol, Levante and Elche had already played a second fixture. Rather than force the data into a round number, we have used each club's own opening match. That gives 20 clubs and 220 starters, 219 of whom have a published height.

The overall picture first. Across those 219 starters the La Liga average is 181.39cm. Real Madrid lead on 184.73cm, Levante are bottom on 176.64cm, a spread of 8.09cm. On the same opening-round, starting-XI basis the Premier League averaged 183.93cm with a spread of 5.18cm, the Eredivisie 181.96cm with a spread of 8.55cm, and J1 179.05cm with a spread of 6.00cm. La Liga is therefore only the third tallest of the four, and the second most uneven. One of the world's elite divisions is 0.57cm shorter than the Eredivisie.

Real Madrid Top It — 201cm and 173cm in the Same XI, and Still Only Fifth on Premier League Terms

Real Madrid lead on 184.73cm. José Mourinho's first league match ended in a 2-1 win at Espanyol on 22 August. Behind the ball they stacked three tall men — Courtois (201cm), Dean Huijsen (196cm) and Ibrahima Konaté (193cm) — and added Denzel Dumfries (188cm) at right-back. In front of them the four attacking players were all small: Kylian Mbappé (178cm), Vinícius Júnior (175cm), Arda Güler (175cm) and Bernardo Silva (173cm), a 28cm gap from top to bottom within one eleven. Height at the back, size sacrificed in front. And yet that 184.73cm would only be fifth in the Premier League, level with Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. The tallest side in La Liga is a mid-table side in England.

Second-placed Osasuna are tall in a much plainer way. Goalkeeper Sergio Herrera and centre-backs Jorge Herrando and Alejandro Catena all measure 193cm, and Ante Budimir (191cm) started up front: four players of 190cm or more in a 4-4-2, the most of any club in the division (Madrid had three). Their 184.27cm is exactly the figure that put Tottenham tenth in the Premier League. Sevilla, third, are different again — not one player of 190cm or more, and they still reached 184.00cm, because the whole eleven fits inside a 10cm band from 178cm to 188cm. That 10cm range is the narrowest in the league, and Sevilla were the only La Liga club whose entire XI stood 178cm or taller; the Premier League had four.

It is at the bottom that the gap to England becomes obvious. Celta Vigo, 19th, lined up in a 3-4-3 with three players of 170cm (Aleix Febas, Javi Galán, Sergio Carreira) and nobody at 190cm or above. Levante, 20th, had Aïssa Mandi's 185cm as their tallest man and likewise no one in the 190s. Levante's 176.64cm is lower than bottom-placed NEC Nijmegen in the Eredivisie (177.73cm) and a full 4.63cm below bottom-placed Bournemouth in the Premier League (181.27cm). More than that: the bottom three here — Rayo Vallecano 178.27cm, Celta 178.18cm, Levante 176.64cm — all come in below Avispa Fukuoka's 180.91cm, the tallest club in J1 on the same basis. In the Premier League even the shortest club out-measured the tallest in J1. In La Liga that no longer holds.

Four Leagues Compared — The Height Is in Goal and at Centre-Back, Nowhere Else

The 2.54cm deficit to the Premier League is not spread evenly across the pitch. Broken down by position, La Liga's goalkeepers (189.70cm) and defenders (182.70cm) are level with or fractionally above the Eredivisie. Midfielders, though, drop to 179.09cm and forwards to 178.92cm. The forwards are the only group among the four leagues to fall below 180cm, and they come in 1.12cm under J1's 180.04cm. Whatever height La Liga has is concentrated in goal and at centre-back.

Inside that midfield figure, exactly one starter of 190cm or more was a midfielder: Barcelona's Marc Bernal at 193cm. On the same basis the Premier League had six and the Eredivisie four (J1 had none). La Liga does not design its midfield as a place to put height — indeed, eight of the sixteen players at 170cm or under, listed below, are registered midfielders.

The twenty goalkeepers average 189.70cm. Exactly half of them — ten — stand 190cm or taller, short of the Premier League's thirteen. The smallest are Antonio Sivera (Alavés), Mathew Ryan (Levante) and Alfonso Herrero (Málaga), all on 183cm. At the other end, Courtois's 201cm is the only figure above 200cm in the division — though the Premier League goes higher still, with Ipswich's Kjell Scherpen at 206cm.

Tallest Is Courtois at 201cm — and Only Two Players Reach 196cm, Both of Them Madrid's

To the individuals. The tallest starter on any opening day was Real Madrid's Courtois at 201cm, and only two players in the whole division reached 196cm — Courtois and Huijsen, both Madrid players. The Premier League had thirteen at 196cm or above on the same basis, a difference of more than sixfold. Widen the net to 191cm and you get 23 players: ten goalkeepers, ten defenders, two forwards and a single midfielder. La Liga's tall men are, almost without exception, stationed on the spine in front of goal.

And the other end? Four players started below 170cm: Deportivo's Mario Soriano (163cm), Espanyol's Tyrhys Dolan (165cm), Rayo's Álvaro García (168cm) and Levante's Carlos Álvarez (168cm). That is 1.8% of the 219 — more than the Premier League's single player (0.5%), far fewer than J1's sixteen (7.3%). Extend the line to 170cm exactly, however, and the count jumps to sixteen, or 7.3% — the same share as J1, and nearly double the Premier League's nine (4.1%). Soriano's 163cm is below the shortest starter in England (Daniel Muñoz of Crystal Palace, 165cm). La Liga does not field many genuinely tiny players; it simply treats 170cm as an entirely ordinary height for a starter.

Those sixteen break down as eight midfielders, six defenders and two forwards. The six defenders are mostly left-backs — Manu Sánchez (Levante), Rafa Garrido (Málaga), Fran García (Betis) — plus Celta's pair of wing-backs, Javi Galán and Sergio Carreira: as in England, the wide lanes are where a small player is permitted first. In La Liga, though, it reaches the middle too. Celta's Febas played centre midfield at 170cm, and Rayo's entire midfield-and-attacking-midfield trio — Isi Palazón, Unai López and Álvaro García — stood 170cm or under.

Deportivo Span 30cm in One XI, and Kubo and Sato Both Started

The widest internal range belongs to Deportivo La Coruña: Bright Ede at 193cm and Mario Soriano at 163cm in the same eleven, 30cm apart. Real Madrid and Espanyol follow on 28cm. The flattest are Sevilla's 10cm, then Atlético Madrid on 13cm and Málaga on 15cm. Atlético started nobody in the 190s at all — Jan Oblak, Dávid Hancko and Robin Le Normand share top billing at 188cm — and their 182.30cm for ninth place is arguably lower than the reputation of a Diego Simeone side would suggest (their average is taken from ten players, as no published height could be found for defender Jorge Domínguez).

A word on systems. The two clubs in a 4-4-2 (Osasuna, Villarreal) averaged 184.05cm, the highest of any shape, while Celta's 3-4-3 was the lowest on 178.18cm. The most common shape, the 4-2-3-1, was used by eleven clubs averaging 181.02cm, marginally below the league figure — but those eleven include both top-placed Madrid and bottom-placed Levante. As in the three leagues we have looked at before, who you pick matters far more than the shape you pick.

Two Japanese players started an opening match: Takefusa Kubo (173cm) for Real Sociedad and Ryunosuke Sato (170cm) for Valencia. Kubo, joint-shortest in his side alongside Sergio Gómez, was part of a 1-0 defeat at Betis; Sato played on the right of midfield in a 0-0 draw with Celta. Sato's 170cm puts him on the list of the division's sixteen shortest starters — which, as everything above shows, is nothing out of the ordinary in La Liga. Height, of course, is only one component of a result. Set-piece goals scored and conceded, dealing with crosses, and conversely the mobility to play out from the back — whether this ranking actually means anything will be settled over 38 rounds. Tap any club name to load its latest formation and rearrange the players yourself.

Note: the sample is the starting eleven named by each club for its first league match of the 2026-27 season — 220 players in total. Because La Liga's opening round was spread across 15-24 August 2026, the figures are aligned on each club's own opening match rather than on a round number (Sevilla, Espanyol, Levante and Elche had already played a second fixture within that window). Substitutes are excluded. Heights are simple averages rounded to two decimal places. No published height could be found for Atlético Madrid defender Jorge Domínguez, so that club's average, and the league-wide figures, are calculated from the remaining 219 players. Clubs on identical figures are listed in no particular order. Premier League, Eredivisie and J1 figures are compiled under the same conditions (opening round, starting XI only). Compiled by Fomelabo.