Other than the Olympics, there is arguably no bigger sporting event on the planet than the FIFA World Cup. The World Cup comes around every four years and pits 32 soccer teams from around the world against each other with the winner being crowned world champion. The qualification for this tournament is strenuous and can take up to two years to narrow down the hundreds of international soccer teams down to a final 32 to make the tournament. Here in this article I will be taking a look back at the history of the event and how it got to the spectacle it is today.
The first official FIFA World Cup was held in 1930, but international football itself has a much longer history. The first official international football match actually took place in 1872 between Scotland and England, and at this stage of the sport it was seldom played outside of Great Britain. But within the next few decades, word of the sport had spread around the world to countless other nations as well. By 1900, national associations were being founded and the first official club match outside of Great Britain took place in Uruguay between Uruguay and Argentina in 1902. Soccer also first became an Olympic sport in 1900.
(source: http://blog.logodesignguru.com/)
FIFA (which is the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) was first organized in 1904 with numerous countries joining such as France, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and more. Now, there was an attempt by FIFA to create a tournament outside of the Olympics (the pre-cursor to the World Cup) in 1906, but the competition has been described as a failure. It was in 1928 that FIFA decided to have another crack at this and hold their own international tournament, and in 1930, the very first FIFA World Cup took place in Uruguay and the home team went on to win the first ever World Cup.
Since that start nearly a century ago, the World Cup has gone over a number of changes such as the tournament participation increasing from 13 teams in 1930, to now feature 32 teams. While there have been hundreds of teams and countries to participate in the tournament, there have only been 8 different nations to win it and Brazil has won it more than any other country with five wins.
(source: fifa.com)
While soccer as a sport was still catching on around the world when the tournament began, it is massively huge now and the World Cup is consistently one of the hugest events in sports any year it is on. Take the 2014 tournament in Brazil for example. It is estimated that over 3.2 Billion people watched the World Cup at some point during the tournament and FIFA has said that an astonishing 1 Billion people tuned in to the final match to see Germany beat Argentina.
Don’t look for this hype to slow down as soccer is only getting more and more popular, especially in the west. The next two tournaments will take place in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 and don’t be shocked to see those get even bigger TV numbers.
