FIFA World Cup

What is FIFA World Cup ?

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 current champion is Germany which won its fourth title at the 2014 tournament in Brazil.

FIFA World Cup 2018

The FIFA World Cup 2018 was hosted in Russia. The winner of FIFA World Cup 2018 is France. The final match of FIFA World Cup 2018 between France and Croatia was played at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. France and Croatia score is 4-2.

FIFA starting era and teams selection

The first FIFA world cup was played in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 when it was not held because of the Second World War. The current format of the competition involves a qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, to determine which teams qualify for the tournament phase, which is often called the World Cup Finals. After this, 32 teams, including the automatically qualifying host nation(s), compete in the tournament phase for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month.

The world’s first international football match was a challenge match played in Glasgow in 1872 between Scotland and England, which ended in a 0–0 draw.

The World Cup is the most prestigious association 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 audience 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.

FIFA World Cups during World War II

The first international tournament, the inaugural edition of the British Home Championship, took place in 1884. The football popularity grew in 20th century. After FIFA was founded in 1904, it tried to arrange an international football tournament between nations outside in 1906. Thereafter in 1920, 1924, 1928 different matches were played as Olympic tournament and as 1924 was the start of FIFA’s professional era.

Due to success of Olympic football tournaments, it started looking at staging its own international tournament outside of the Olympics.

The first two World Cup matches took place simultaneously on 13 July 1930, and were won by France and the USA, who defeated Mexico 4–1 and Belgium 3–0 respectively. The first goal in World Cup history was scored by Lucien Laurent of France. In the final, Uruguay defeated Argentina 4–2 in front of a crowd of 93,000 people in Montevideo, and in doing so became the first nation to win the World Cup. The 1942 and 1946 competitions, which Germany and Brazil sought to host, were cancelled due to World War II and its aftermath.

After world war II, In Brazil 1950 world cup held. In the tournaments between 1934 and 1978, 16 teams competed in each tournament, later the tournament was expanded to 24 teams in 1982 and then to 32 in 1998.

Two hundred teams entered the 2002 FIFA World Cup qualification rounds; 198 nations attempted to qualify for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, while a record 204 countries entered qualification for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In October 2016 FIFA president Gianni Infantino stated his support for a 48-team World Cup in 2026. On 10 January 2017, FIFA confirmed the 2026 World Cup will have 48 finalist teams.

Results

So far we discussed about the FIFA World Cup and history. Now let’s have a look at the data of FIFA Wrold Cup winners by year. The table data shows the year of FIFA World Cup held and the winner, as well as runners-up, teams, scores and hosts where the FIFA World Cup was played. The current FIFA World Cup 2018 is being held in Russia.

• a.e.t.: after extra time
• PSO: after penalty shoot-out
• TBD: to be determined

Brazil have won five times, Germany & Italy four times, France, Argentina & Uruguay two times FIFA World Cup. England, Spain have won one time.
That’s all about FIFA World Cup !.

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Source : Wikipedia