FIFA World Cup

“All in One Rhythm” – motto of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

The FIFA World Cup is a soccer (association football) competition open to countries worldwide, that is held every four years and organised by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).
Over 200 teams from various countries compete against each other in the three years prior to the month long FIFA World Cup, and from those teams, 32 are selected to play in the World Cup.
The first FIFA World Cup tournament began on the 13 July, 1930 in Uruguay, South America, and was established by the then FIFA president Jules Rimet, so that there was a soccer competition outside the Olympic Games, but the number of countries participating from Europe was low, due to the location and the effort and time required to travel to South America.
The champion of the FIFA World Cup is determined by 32 teams competing against each other in round-robin style tournaments in groups of four, with the top two teams of each group advancing to a round of knockout style tournaments, and if a team is successful in that round, they move on to a series of finals, and eventually the grand final, where the winners take home millions of dollars in prize money and a replica of the trophy.
The only team to have competed in every FIFA World Cup has been the Brazilian team, which has won more than any other, with five wins to their name up until 2010, with Italy close behind with four wins.

The FIFA World Cup has been cancelled twice, due to World War II, in 1942 and 1946.
Originally, the FIFA World Cup had 16 teams compete against each other, but this number rose to 24 in 1982 and to 32 in 1998, although there has been talk of increasing the number to 40.
The ‘FIFA World Cup’ is also known as the ‘World Cup’, and up until 2010, there had only been eight winning countries in the nineteen World Cup tournaments.
The original FIFA World Cup trophy that was named after the founder and was called the ‘Jules Rimet Trophy’, was stolen in 1983 and never found, after it was given to Brazil to keep in 1970 for their third win, which led to a new trophy design in 1974, which is 36 centimetres (14.2 inches) in height, 6.2 kilograms (13.6 pounds) in weight and is made of 18 carat solid gold.
The FIFA World Cup is the most popularly watched sporting event in the world, and has more viewers than the Olympic Games, with a ninth of the world’s population watching the grand final in 2006.

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