Regional Soccer Player Composites

I've been trying out this new morphing software that detects faces automatically and puts the control points in place for you. It has a few kinks but it saves a lot of time, so I made some quick regional versions of the earlier soccer player composites. They still look very similar, but breaking the samples down like this reveals minor differences not only between the North, Center and South but also within each of those areas. Many of the new samples are quite small though, and remember that some surnames may hail from neighboring regions, so these are not perfect representations.

Trentino/Friuli (N = 10)

Veneto (N = 49)

Lombardy (N = 95)

Piedmont (N = 20)

Liguria (N = 9)

Emilia-Romagna (N = 43)

Tuscany (N = 44)

Marche/Umbria (N = 21)

Lazio (N = 44)

Abruzzo (N = 7)

Campania (N = 58)

Puglia (N = 35)

Calabria (N = 19)

Sicily (N = 25)

Sardinia (N = 11)

Software: Abrosoft FaceMixer

Soccer Player Facial Composites

I've made facial composites out of large random samples of Northern, Central and Southern Italian soccer players from the RaiSport website, using both birthplace and surname origin as the criteria for inclusion. This is the third (and by far the biggest) regional comparison of this sort that I've done now, and it's the third time that the composites have come out looking almost identical.

Northern Italian (N = 227)

Central Italian (N = 116)

Southern Italian (N = 152)

Here's an animated GIF of the three composites morphing into each other in an endless loop. You have to look closely to see the changes.


Software: Sqirlz Morph

Related: Regional Soccer Player Composites

Northern and Southern Facial Composites

Here's a comparison of phenotypes from Northern and Southern Italy using large random samples of 2000-2006 Miss Italia beauty pageant contestants, and deputies from the 14th Legislature of the Italian Republic, which were averaged out to create composite faces. Note that I've left out the soccer player composites that were part of my original post because of the small sample sizes and other issues.

40 Models from Veneto, Northern Italy

43 Models from Sicily, Southern Italy

36 Deputies from Veneto, Northern Italy

56 Deputies from Sicily, Southern Italy

The composite Veneto model's hair is about half a shade lighter than the Sicilian model's, and the Sicilian deputy is a little older, grayer and balder than the Veneto deputy. But apart from that, the similarities are quite striking — even greater than those between other adjacent Caucasoid groups. That shouldn't really come as a surprise, but I'm sure it will to Nordicists and people raised on stereotypes.

Software: Sqirlz Morph