[La Liga] Average Height Ranking — All 20 Clubs, Round 4 of 2026-27

La Liga's fourth round of the 2026-27 season was played between 3 and 7 September 2026. For this piece we took the eleven players each of the 20 clubs sent out in that round 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 play with. The conditions are identical to our Premier League, Eredivisie and J1 pieces.

There is a reason for choosing round four rather than the opening weekend. La Liga's opening round did not fit into a single weekend at all: the first match was Alavés against Getafe on 15 August, but Osasuna did not play until 24 August, ten days later, and four clubs had already played a second fixture in between. Round four was the first week in which every club's fourth match fell inside a tidy five-day window — the first point at which the division can be compared on level terms.

The overall picture first. Across the 20 clubs and 220 starters the La Liga average is 181.12cm. Real Madrid lead on 184.73cm, Levante are bottom on 176.18cm, a spread of 8.55cm. On the same starting-XI basis the Premier League's opening round 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 tied with the Eredivisie as the most uneven. One of the world's elite divisions is 0.84cm shorter than the Eredivisie. The choice of round makes little difference, incidentally: run the same calculation on each club's opening match and La Liga averages 181.39cm, only 0.27cm away from the round-four figure.

Real Madrid Top It — 201cm and 175cm Split Front and Back, and Still Beaten 1-0 at Betis

Real Madrid lead on 184.73cm. Courtois (201cm) in goal, Dean Huijsen (196cm) and Ibrahima Konaté (193cm) at centre-back and Denzel Dumfries (188cm) at right-back gave them three players of 190cm or more. In front of that, Vinícius Júnior, Arda Güler and left-back Marc Cucurella all stand 175cm, a 26cm gap from top to bottom within one eleven: height behind, mobility ahead. That 184.73cm is also, to the centimetre, the figure they posted in their opening match. Carreras (185cm) had given way to Cucurella (175cm) at left-back while Bernardo Silva (173cm) had given way to Eduardo Camavinga (183cm) — ten centimetres off, ten centimetres on, and the average did not move at all.

The striking thing about round four is that the three tallest sides all lost. Madrid went down 1-0 away to Betis, twelfth here on 180.55cm. Second-placed Villarreal (184.55cm) lost 3-2 at home to nineteenth-placed Deportivo La Coruña (177.27cm). Third-placed Osasuna (184.45cm) were beaten 5-2 by seventeenth-placed Alavés (179.27cm). Three defeats, three opponents shorter than them — as neat a demonstration as you could ask for that height and result are not the same thing.

Deportivo were the only club in the division to start two players under 170cm — Mario Soriano (163cm) and Luis Cruz (165cm) — and they won at the second-tallest side in the league. Levante, bottom, had Aïssa Mandi's 185cm as their tallest man and nine of their eleven under 180cm. Their 176.18cm is 1.55cm below bottom-placed NEC Nijmegen in the Eredivisie (177.73cm) and 5.09cm below bottom-placed Bournemouth in the Premier League (181.27cm). More than that: the nine clubs from twelfth-placed Betis downwards 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 nearly half the division falls short of it.

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

The 2.81cm deficit to the Premier League is not spread evenly across the pitch. Broken down by position, La Liga's goalkeepers (189.70cm) and defenders (182.32cm) are more or less level with the Eredivisie. Midfielders, though, drop to 179.17cm and forwards to 178.69cm. The forwards are the only group among the four leagues to fall below 180cm, and they come in 1.35cm 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 Rodri at 191cm. 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. Eight of the twenty clubs — Sevilla, Valencia, Málaga, Celta, Alavés, Rayo, Deportivo and Levante — did not start a single player of 190cm or above. Fifth-placed Sevilla are the interesting case there: no one at 190cm, and yet 183.09cm, because their whole eleven sits inside a 13cm band from 175cm to 188cm. They rank high not through height but through the absence of anyone short.

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), Alfonso Herrero (Málaga) and Mathew Ryan (Levante), 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 in round four 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, nine defenders, three 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? Five players started below 170cm: Deportivo's Mario Soriano (163cm), Celta's Ilaix Moriba (165cm), Deportivo's Luis Cruz (165cm), Espanyol's Tyrhys Dolan (165cm) and Rayo's Álvaro García (168cm). That is 2.3% of the 220 — more than the Premier League's single player (0.5%), far fewer than J1's sixteen (7.3%). Extend the line to 170cm exactly and the count reaches thirteen, or 5.9%, sitting neatly between the Premier League's nine (4.1%) and J1's sixteen (7.3%). Soriano's 163cm is below the shortest starter in England (Daniel Muñoz of Crystal Palace, 165cm) — the smallest starter in any of the four leagues.

Those thirteen break down as five midfielders, five defenders and three forwards. Four of the five defenders are left-backs — Fran García (Betis), Alejandro Grimaldo (Atlético), Rafa Garrido (Málaga) and Manu Sánchez (Levante) — with Celta's right wing-back Sergio Carreira the fifth: as in England, the wide lanes are where a small player is permitted first. In La Liga, though, it reaches the middle too. Deportivo started 163cm Soriano in central midfield and 165cm Luis Cruz on the right, and took three goals off the second-tallest side in the division.

Nine Different Shapes, a 28cm Range at Espanyol — and Kubo Started Too

The widest internal range belongs to Espanyol at 28cm, with 193cm Marko Dmitrovic and 165cm Tyrhys Dolan in the same eleven. Real Madrid follow on 26cm and Deportivo on 25cm. The flattest is Alavés at 10cm — nobody in the 190s, nobody in the low 170s, the whole side between 175cm and 185cm — with Sevilla's 13cm next. Worth noting: not one club in round four fielded an eleven in which every player stood 178cm or taller. Four Premier League clubs managed that on the opening weekend, which is another way of saying the floor is lower here.

A word on systems. Twenty clubs used nine different shapes in this round. The most common was the 4-2-3-1 with six clubs (181.83cm), then the 4-3-3 with four (180.57cm), the 4-4-2 with three (180.73cm) and the 3-5-2 with two (180.36cm). Of the one-off shapes, Osasuna's 4-2-2-2 was the tallest at 184.45cm and Levante's 4-1-4-1 the shortest at 176.18cm. But the three clubs in a 4-4-2 finished 2nd, 13th and 19th on this table, so once again who you pick matters far more than the shape you pick.

One Japanese player started the round: Takefusa Kubo (173cm) in Real Sociedad's goalless draw with Celta. He was joint-shortest in his side alongside Sergio Gómez — though with thirteen players starting at 170cm or below across the division, 173cm in La Liga is closer to ordinary than to small. Height, of course, is only one component of a result, as three defeats for the three tallest sides in this very round made plain. 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 in round four of the 2026-27 season, played 3-7 September 2026 — 220 players in total. Substitutes are excluded. Heights are simple averages rounded to two decimal places. Round four was chosen because La Liga's opening round was spread across 15-24 August 2026 and cannot be compared on level terms; round four was the first week in which every club's fourth match fell inside a single five-day window. Two fixtures in that window — Getafe v Celta and Elche v Real Sociedad — were fifth matches for Celta and Real Sociedad, so those two clubs are represented here by Real Sociedad v Celta on 3 September, the fourth match for both. Clubs on identical figures are listed in no particular order. Premier League, Eredivisie and J1 figures are compiled from their opening rounds on the same starting-XI basis. Compiled by Fomelabo.