Luca Zidane, Giovanni Reyna, Giuliano Simeone Multiple players participating in the 2026 World Cup are following in their fathers footsteps on footballs biggest stage.But is footballing talent genetically inherited?In 2012, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands studied thousands of twins and found that heritability of athlete status was estimated at 66 percent.In 2011, the University of Cape Town reached a similar conclusion, stating that elite sporting performance is the result of the interaction between genetic and training factors.Although deliberate training and other environmental factors are critical for elite performance, they cannot by themselves produce an elite athlete. Rather, individual performance thresholds are determined by our genetic makeup, the researchers saidSource: @trtworld on X/Twitter