When the World Cup is finally over and the last tears have fallen, there will still be statues. There are more than four hundred public, soccer-related statues around the world, according to a database just published by the Sporting Statues Project— statues of Pelé, of Ronaldo, of Northern Ireland’s George Best, of players and managers otherwise lost to time. They stand outside stadiums; they occupy town squares, traffic circles, and graveyards. Of the four life-size statues honoring the retired Mexican striker Hugo Sánchez, two are installed on the roof of his own house in Cancún.

The Sporting Statues Project was started, in 2010, by Chris Stride and John Wilson, two statisticians at the University of Sheffield, and Ffion Thomas, who is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Central Lancashire’s International Football Institute. Four years ago, Stride ran a study that counted and categorized every incident of cheating during the 2010 World Cup. After that, he got to wondering about the many soccer statues he saw in the U.K. To compile their global list, Stride and Thomas spoke to sculptors, football historians, and museum curators around the world and searched Google in multiple languages. The two have become statuary scholars, publishing on subjects such as “Honoring Heroes by Branding in Bronze: Theorizing the UK’s Football Statuary” and “The Thierry Henry Statue: A Hollow Icon?” (They’ve also built databases of all the known statues related to baseball, cricket, and Britain’s sportsmen and women.)

“The interesting thing here is not how many there were and where, but why they were there,” Stride told me. “Statues tell you more about the people who put them up than the person who’s depicted.”

The oldest statue they found, of an anonymous player (“The Footballer”), was erected in 1903, in Copenhagen, but ninety-five per cent have gone up in the past two decades, and that timing is revealing, Stride said. Money began pouring into élite club soccer in the early nineteen-nineties. (The top-flight English Premier League started in 1992.) Formerly local clubs became teams of transient all-stars, with players happy to be traded for just a little more money. Quirky (and often dangerous) stadiums were replaced by what Stride and Thomas have called “identikit stadia evoking little memory or tradition.” Football fans, like their baseball counterparts in the U.S., began pining for a prelapsarian era of player fealty and true sports meaning.

Statues aim for that soft spot. Most are erected by clubs, to tap into fans’ nostalgia. “It’s the club saying, We have a tradition; we’re a historic team,” Stride said. “Clubs are trying to get some identity into the stadium, and a statue is a cheap and easy way to do it.” Sometimes fans will organize their own statue-building efforts, as a way of showing that “fans own the club’s history, too, not just the corporate people,” Stride said. And then there are rogue statues, like “Coup de Tête,” erected by an artist in Doha, which depicts an infamous encounter between French striker Zinedine Zidane and Italy’s Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final. “Zidane headbutting Materazzi would not be something that football authorities would want to you be thinking about,” Stride said. “But it is a side of the game that fans actually secretly enjoy.”