FIFA World Cup Tickets

⚽FIFA World Cup

The Fifa World Cup, more commonly called the World Cup, is an international football competition between the senior men’s national teams of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), football’s global governing body. The World Cup is the most anticipated and celebrated sporting event in the world, and has taken place every four years since its inaugural tournament in 1930. The tournament will be jointly hosted by 16 cities in three North American countries: Canada, Mexico and the United States. 

History

After FIFA took responsibility for managing the Olympic football tournament in 1914 and recognised the success of the international competition, the governing body started looking at staging its own separate tournament and as a result the first world championship was hosted in Uruguay in 1930.

In the 1930 World Cup Final, Uruguay defeated Argentina 4-2 to a crowd of 93,000 people and became the first nation to win the World Cup. It wasn’t until 1950 that Britain joined the World Cup and over the years the tournament has steadily expanded to include more and more nations.

Since the 1934 World Cup, the competition has included qualifying rounds in order to reduce the number of matches required for the final tournament. The qualifying rounds are held within the six FIFA continental zones, Africa, Asia, North and Central America and Caribbean, South American, Oceania and Europe, and are overseen by their respective confederations.

The final tournament currently features 32 national teams who compete over the course of a month in the host nation and it is broken down into group stages followed by the knockout stage. Once the knockout stage is reached, the World Cup becomes a single-elimination tournament in which the teams play each other in one-off matches and extra time and penalty shootouts are used to decide the winner if necessary.

The World Cup is the most widely viewed and followed single sporting event in the world, it is estimated that a ninth of the entire population of the world watched the 2006 World Cup final.

FIFA World Cup Winners