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 Spain, who won the 2010 tournament in South Africa,
Runner-up is Netherlands, Germany (Third Place) and Uruguay (Fourth Place).
The current format of the tournament
involves 32 teams competing for the title at venues within the host nation(s)
over a period of about a month; this phase is often called the World Cup
Finals. A qualification phase, which currently takes
place over the preceding three years, is used to determine which teams qualify
for the tournament together with the host nation(s).
The 19 World Cup tournaments have
been won by eight different national teams. Brazil have won five times, and they are
the only team to have played in every tournament (Brazil automatically
qualified for the 2014 tournament, as the host nation). The other World Cup
winners are Italy, with four titles; West Germany, with three
titles; Argentina and inaugural
winners Uruguay, with two titles
each; and England, France, and Spain, with one title each.
The World Cup is 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 FIFA 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.
The 2014 FIFA
World Cup is currently being contested in Brazil. The next two World
Cups will be hosted by Russia in 2018, and Qatar in 2022. 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, with several having reached the quarter-finals: Mexico, quarter-finalists in 1986; Cameroon, quarter-finalists
in 1990; Korea Republic, finishing
in fourth place in 2002; Senegal, along with USA, both
quarter-finalists in 2002; and Ghana as quarter-finalists in 2010.
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. 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.
Since the second World Cup in 1934, qualifying tournaments have been held to
thin the field for the final tournament. They are held within the six FIFA
continental zones (Africa, Asia, North and
Central America and Caribbean, South America,
Oceania, and Europe), overseen by their
respective confederations. For each tournament, FIFA decides the number of
places awarded to each of the continental zones beforehand, generally based on
the relative strength of the confederations' teams.
To date, the final of the World Cup
has only been contested by European and South American teams. European nations have won ten titles;
South American teams have won nine. Only two teams from outside these two
continents have ever reached the semi-finals of the competition: USA (North,
Central America and Caribbean) in 1930 and South Korea (Asia) who reached the semis in 2002. The
best result of an African team is reaching
the quarter-finals: Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002 and Ghana in 2010. Only one Oceanian qualifier, Australia in 2006, has
advanced to the second round.
This year (2014) World Cup in Brazil
is being hotly contested by 32 teams from six (6) FIFA Continental Zones, and
group into eight (8) groupings, as follows:
Group A (Brazil, Mexico, Croatia, Cameroon)
Group B (Netherlands, Chile, Spain,
Australia)
Group C (Colombia, Greece, Cote d’Ivoire,
Japan)
Group D (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Italy,
England)
Group E (France, Switzerland, Ecuador,
Honduras)
Group F (Argentina, Nigeria, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Iran)
Group G (Germany, USA, Portugal, Ghana)
Group H (Belgium, Algeria, Russia, Korea
Republic)
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