FIFA World Cup

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

## History

### The beginning and formation

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.

In 1914, FIFA agreed to recognise 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, at the 1920 Summer Olympics. 1924 was the start of FIFA's professional era, after the first two open world championship in Summer Olympics 1924 and 1928, are held.

Due to the success of the Olympic football tournaments, FIFA again started looking at staging its own international tournament outside of the Olympics. On 28 May 1928, the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam decided to stage a world championship itself. With Uruguay now two-time official football world champions and to celebrate their centenary of independence in 1930, FIFA named Uruguay as the host country of the inaugural World Cup tournament. 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.

After the creation of the World Cup, the 1932 Summer Olympics, held in Los Angeles, did not plan to include football as part of the schedule. FIFA and the IOC disagreed over the status of amateur players, and so football was dropped from the Games. Olympic football returned at the 1936 Summer Olympics, but was now overshadowed by the more prestigious World Cup.

The issues facing the early World Cup tournaments were the difficulties of intercontinental travel, and war. 1942 and 1946 tournaments are cancelled due to World War II.

### After the World War II

The 1950 World Cup, held in Brazil, was the first to include British participants. The tournament also saw the return of 1930 champions Uruguay. Uruguay won the tournament again after defeating the host nation Brazil, in the match called "Maracanazo" (Portuguese: Maracanaço).

In the tournaments between 1934 and 1978, 16 teams competed in each tournament. Most of the participating nations were from Europe and South America, with a small minority from North America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. These teams were usually defeated easily by the European and South American teams.

### Expansion

The tournament was expanded to 24 teams in 1982, and then to 32 in 1998, also allowing more teams from Africa, Asia and North America to take part. Since then, teams from these regions have enjoyed more success. Nevertheless, European and South American teams continue to dominate, e.g., the quarter-finalists in 1994, 1998, and 2006 were all from Europe or South America and so were the finalists of all tournaments so far.

## Format

### Final tournament

The current final tournament has been used since 1998 and features 32 national teams competing over the course of a month in the host nation(s). There are two stages: the group stage followed by the knockout stage.

In the group stage, teams compete within eight groups of four teams each. Each group plays a round-robin tournament, in which each team is scheduled for three matches against other teams in the same group. This means that a total of six matches are played within a group. The two top teams from each group advance to the knockout stage.

## Results

* *a.e.t.*: after extra time
* *p*: after penalty shoot out