The FIFA World Cup, often just referred to as the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men’s national groups of those members of their F??d??ration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport’s global governing body. The championship was given every four years since the inaugural championship in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 as it was not held due to the Second World War. The current champion is France, which won its second title in the 2018 tournament in Russia.
The present format of the contest involves a qualification phase, which currently occurs over the preceding three decades, to determine which teams qualify for the championship phase, which is frequently known as the World Cup Finals. After this, 32 teams, including the automatically qualifying host nation(s), compete in the tournament phase for the title at places within the host nation(s) over a period of roughly a month.
The 21 World Cup tournaments have been won by eight national teams. Brazil have won five times, and they’re the only team to have played every tournament. Another World Cup winners are Germany and Italy, with four names each; Argentina, France and inaugural winner Uruguay, together with two names each; and England and Spain with one name each.
The World Cup is the most prestigious institution football tournament in the world, as well as the most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games; the cumulative viewership of all matches of the 2006 World Cup was likely to become 26.29 billion with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the final match, a ninth of the whole population of Earth. [1][2][3][4]
17 states have hosted the World Cup. Brazil, France, Italy, Germany and Mexico have each hosted double, while Uruguay, Switzerland, Sweden, Chile, England, Argentina, Spain, the United States, Japan and South Korea (jointly), South Africa and Russia have each hosted formerly. Qatar are planned as hosts of the 2022 finals, also 2026 will be jointly hosted by Canada, the United States and Mexico, which will give Mexico the distinction of being the first nation to have hosted games in three finals.
The world’s first international football game was a challenge game played Glasgow in 1872 between Scotland and England,[5] which ended in a 0–0 draw. The very first global championship, the British Home Championship, happened in 1884. [6] As football grew in popularity in different parts of earth at the onset of the 20th century, it was held as a demonstration game with no awards given in the 1900 and 1904 Summer Olympics (however, the International Olympic Committee has retroactively upgraded their status to official events), and in the 1906 Intercalated Games. [7]
Following FIFA was founded in 1904, it strove to arrange an global soccer tournament between countries away from the Olympic framework in Switzerland in 1906. These were very early days for international football, and the official history of FIFA clarifies the competition as having been a failure. [8]
At the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, football became an official competition. Planned by The Football Association (FA), England’s soccer governing body, the occasion was for amateur players simply and was considered suspiciously as a series as opposed to a competition. Great Britain (represented by the England national amateur football team) won the gold medals. They repeated the feat at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm.
With the Olympic event continued to be contested only between amateur teams, Sir Thomas Lipton organised the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy tournament in Turin in 1909. The Lipton tournament was a championship involving individual clubs (not national teams) from different nations, each of which represented an whole nation. The contest may be described as The First World Cup,[9] and featured the most prestigious professional club sides from Italy, Germany and Switzerland, but the FA of England refused to be associated with the rivalry and declined the offer to send a team. Lipton invited West Auckland, an amateur side from County Durham, to signify England instead. West Auckland won the tournament and returned in 1911 to successfully defend their title.
Back in 1914, FIFA agreed to recognise the Olympic championship as a”world football championship for amateurs”, and took responsibility for managing the occasion. [10] This paved the way for the world’s first intercontinental football competition, at the 1920 Summer Olympics, contested by Egypt and 13 European groups, and won by Belgium. [11] Uruguay won the next two Olympic football tournaments in 1924 and 1928. These were the first two open world championships, as 1924 was the start of FIFA’s professional age.
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