The FIFA World Cup, often simply called
the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the
sport's global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four
years since the inaugural tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 when it was not held because
of the Second World War. The current champions are France, who won their second title at the 2018 tournament in Russia.
The current format involves a qualification phase, which
takes place over the preceding three years, to determine which teams qualify
for the tournament phase. In the tournament phase, 32 teams, including the
automatically qualifying host nation(s), compete for the title at venues within
the host nation(s) over about a month.
As of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, twenty-one
final tournaments have been held and a total of 79 national teams have
competed. The trophy has been won by eight national teams. Brazil have won five
times, and they are the only team to have played in every tournament. The other
World Cup winners are Germany and Italy, with four titles
each; Argentina, France, and
inaugural winner Uruguay, with two titles
each; and England and Spain, with one title each.
The World Cup is the most prestigious
association football tournament in the world, as well as the most widely viewed
and followed single sporting event in the world. The cumulative viewership of
all matches of the 2006 World Cup was
estimated to be 26.29 billion with an estimated 715.1 million people
watching the final match, a ninth of the
entire population of the planet.
17 countries have hosted the World Cup.
Brazil, France, Italy, Germany, and Mexico have each hosted twice, while
Uruguay, Switzerland, Sweden, Chile, England, Argentina, Spain, the United
States, Japan and South Korea (jointly), South Africa, and Russia have each
hosted once. Qatar will host the 2022 tournament, and 2026 will be jointly
hosted by Canada, the United States, and Mexico, which will give Mexico the
distinction of being the first country to host games in three World Cups.
The world's first international football match was a
challenge match played in Glasgow in 1872 between Scotland and England.
The first international tournament for nations, the inaugural British Home Championship,
took place in 1884. As football grew in popularity in other parts of the
world at the start of the 20th century, it was held as a demonstration sport with
no medals awarded at the 1900 and 1904 Summer
Olympics (however, the International Olympic Committee has
retroactively upgraded their status to official events), and at the 1906
Intercalated Games.
After FIFA was founded in 1904, it tried to
arrange an international football tournament between nations outside the
Olympic framework in Switzerland in 1906. These were very early days for
international football, and the official history of FIFA describes the
competition as having been a failure.
At the 1908 Summer
Olympics in London, football became an official competition.
Planned by The Football Association (FA),
England's football governing body, the event was for amateur players only and was regarded suspiciously as a
show rather than 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 continuing 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
between individual clubs (not national teams) from different nations, each one
of which represented an entire nation. The competition is sometimes described
as The First World Cup,[10] and featured the most prestigious professional
club sides from Italy, Germany and Switzerland, but the FA of England refused
to be associated with the competition and declined the offer to send a professional
team. Lipton invited West Auckland, an amateur
side from County Durham, to represent England
instead. West Auckland won the tournament and returned in 1911 to successfully
defend their title.[11] Prior to the Lipton competition, from 1876 to
1904, games that were considered the "football world championship"
were meetings between leading English and Scottish clubs, such as the 1895 game between Sunderland A.F.C. and the Heart of Midlothian F.C.,
which Sunderland won.
In 1914, FIFA agreed to recognize the Olympic tournament as
a "world football championship for amateurs", and took responsibility
for managing the event. This paved the way for the world's first
intercontinental football competition for nations, at the 1920 Summer
Olympics, contested by Egypt and 13
European teams, and won by Belgium. Uruguay won the
next two Olympic football tournaments in 1924 and 1928.
Those were also the first two open world championships, as 1924 was the start
of FIFA's professional era.
