For soccer fans, the countdown to the Qatar World Cup has already begun. Seeing the world’s best soccer players live is always exciting, and that’s why we cannot wait to accompany our guests to Qatar while watching the next World Cup. To get you up to speed, we have compiled a list of World Cup facts to make you the smartest person at the next party you attend.
Table of Contents
Continents And Countries
Only two continents have succeeded as champions of the WC: Europe and South America.
As of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, 79 national teams have competed at the final tournaments.
Only South American or European countries have won the World Cup. In fact, of the 20 World Cups, European countries have been finalists in 18 of them.
There are only eight countries to have won the World Cup.
Mexico has qualified without winning the World Cup more than any other country (16 times).
The country with the smallest population to ever compete in the World Cup is Iceland (pop.334,000)
Among the national teams, Germany has played the most World Cup matches (106) and appeared in the most finals (8), semi-finals (13), quarter-finals (16) as well as scoring the most World Cup goals (224), while Brazil has appeared in the most World Cups (20).
In 2002, the FIFA World Cup tournament was held in two countries – South Korea and Japan.
Uruguay in 1950 is the only team to have won the World Cup without winning the final. This is because FIFA changed the rules for that competition only. Rather than teams going from a group stage to a knockout format, the teams when into another group. It just so happened that the final match was between the only two sides that could win the competition, hosts Brazil and 1930 winners Uruguay. Despite being heavy favorites, Brazil went down 2-1.
New Zealand is the only team to go unbeaten in the 2010 World Cup as they drew all 3 of their group stage games. The winners of the tournament, Spain, lost their 1st group stage match to Switzerland.
A European nation has won the past four World Cups and five of the last six – Brazil being the only non-European country to succeed.
France has won two of the last seven tournaments, making them the only country to win multiple World Cups in that time.
The Host Nation
The last nation to win the World Cup as the host was France in 1998.
The host country has won six of the 20 World Cups.
The only host nation not to have reached the second round in South Africa.
Southeast Asia and Oceania have never hosted the tournament.
Players And Coaches
Another interesting world cup fact is that famous cricketer Sir Viv Richards is the only person to have played both World Cup Football and World Cup Cricket. In addition, he played soccer for Antigua in the 1974 World cup qualifiers.
Amazingly a nation with a foreign coach has never won a World Cup. They have all been the same nationally as the team that won.
Bodo Illgner of West Germany was the first-ever goalkeeper to have kept a clean sheet in the FIFA World Cup Final? That was in 1990.
France soccer player Just Fontaine holds the record for the most goals scored in a single World Cup, with his 13 goals in 1958.
Frenchman Didier Deschamps, Brazil’s Mario Zagallo, and Germany Franz Beckenbauer have won the World Cup as player and head coach.
Carlos Caszely from Chile became the first player to be dismissed with a red card in World Cup history. That was in 1974.
Roger Milla from Cameroon is known to be the oldest player to participate in a World Cup Match. This man was responsible for leading his country into the World Cup in 1990.
One of the funniest world cup facts involves the penalty shootout of the great Italian footballer Giuseppe Meazza. In the year 1938, he got a chance of a penalty kick against Brazil. Unfortunately, while he was about to do so, his shorts fell. Despite this malfunction, he picked up his shorts and made the goal beating the goalkeeper, who was still laughing. This goal pushed Italy into the finals.
English referee Graham Poll booked Croatian Josip Simunic three times before sending him off in 2006. He should have been sent off after the second card. However, Poll got confused.
Coach Sepp Herberger’s strategy led Germany to its first World Cup title in 1954. Herberger sent a reserve team on the pitch when he faced favored Hungary in a group stage match and received an 8-3 defeat. When the two countries faced off again in the final, this time with the top players on the field, the West German team achieved the “Miracle of Bern” and won 3-2.
Prizemoney
The winning team receives prize money of USD 38 million. (Russia 2018)
Runners up aren’t disappointed either. They receive USD 25 million.
The prize money for the 2018 World Cup in Russia came to 791 million U.S. dollars, up significantly from the 576 million U.S. dollars at the previous World Cup in Brazil in 2014.
World Cup Trophy
The World Cup trophy went missing for seven days before the World Cup in 1966.
First, there was the Jules Rimet trophy from 1930–1970. It was permanently given to Brazil after winning the tournament three times.
Unfortunately, the Jules Rimet trophy was stolen in 1983 and has not been recovered since.
An interesting fact about the World Cup trophy is made of 18 karat gold.
The trophy was in danger during WW2, so FIFA’s Italian Vice President Otorino Barassi moved the trophy from the vault of the bank it was kept in and placed it in a shoebox under his bed to protect it from the Nazis.
Someone stole the Jules Rimet Trophy from an exhibition at the Westminster Central Hall in 1966, just four months before the FIFA World Cup was held in England. A dog found it, and his owner received a reward of 6,000 British pounds.
World Cup Attendances
The largest attendance of a World Cup match is 199,854 (that’s more than half the population of Iceland!). It was a match between Brazil and Uruguay in Rio de Janeiro in July 1950.
A total of 26.29 billion people viewed all the World Cup matches in 2006.
Seven and a half billion people saw the final match of the tournament, almost a ninth of all people on earth.
The Romania-Peru match took place at Estadio Pocitos in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 14 July 1930, with only 300 people in attendance.
Unusual Facts
During the 2010 South Africa World Cup, over 750,000 liters of beer were sold within the stadiums. That’s equivalent to 3,170,064 beers!
In the 1958 quarter-finals, none of the four losing teams scored a single goal during these matches.
The famous song entitled “Coup de Boule” (“Headbutt”) was inspired by what France’s Zinedine Zidane did during the World Cup final in 2006. He hit Italy’s Marco Materazzi’s chest with his head.
Goal-line technology was first used in the 2014 World Cup.
It wasn’t just England’s glory on the pitch that made the 1996 World Cup special. The union flag football shirt and lion’s mop-top mane of World Cup Willie helped him set new standards for World Cup merchandise. This was the first World Cup mascot.
In the 2002 World Cup Bronze medal match, Turkish soccer legend Hakan Sukur scored just 10.8 seconds after the opening whistle to score the fastest goal in World Cup history.
Use these World Cup facts with your friends or share them on your social media profile.
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