by D. Victor

Created on: September 09, 2008

The World Cup, officially known as the FIFA World Cup, is an association soccer tournament for FIFA-affiliated national teams. That FIFA's quadrennial event can just be called The World Cup (in spite of there being World Cups for other sporting disciplines) demonstrates its immense popularity. The World Cup is an amalgam of a qualification phase and the finals phase. Naturally, the finals phase is the main event, taking place in a host country or host countries over a period of about four weeks.

Global scope

The FIFA World Cup is a truly global event. National teams from all seven continents participate in the qualification phase just over two years before the finals phase. In 2006, the World Cup Finals contained teams from each of the seven continents, due to the participation of Australia. The six continental zones include Europe, Oceania, Asia, Africa, South America and CONCACAF (North America, Central America and the Caribbean).

Currently 32 teams participate in the World Cup Finals. Zones are currently allocated spots as follows: Europe-14, South America-4.5, Africa-5, Asia-4.5, CONCACAF-3.5 and Oceania-0.5
The spots are allocated based primarily on the comparative strength of the confederations. For e.g. South America has four and a half spots, but only has 10 members. The half-berths are settled by intercontinental play-offs.

Brief history

World Cup soccer was first organised in 1930 as an invitation-only event. Prior to 1930, international tournament soccer was only available at the Olympics. A total of 18 World Cup finals occurred between 1930 and 2006. There were no tournaments in the 1942 or 1946 because of World War II. The first World Cup tournament contained only 8 invited teams. Qualification was only introduced after the 1934 tournament.

There were 16 teams in the tournaments between 1934 and 1978, except for 1938 (15 due to Austria being absorbed by Germany). The tournament expanded to 24 teams in 1982 and then 32 teams in 1998. Early tournaments consisted mainly of teams from Europe and South America. However, the expansion of teams ensured greater participation from African, Asian and North American teams.

World Cup Format

In the finals phase, the teams are split into eight groups of four teams each. The group stage is played in a round-robin format where the top two teams qualify for the second round. From the second round onwards, the tournament adopts a single-elimination knock-out format. Following the second round are the quarter-finals, semi-finals,

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