After some information of the current World Cups and their host selections,
I would like to briefly introduce to you the competition format of the World Cup.
and followed by a brief introduction of the history of the World Cup in the next post.
The FIFA World Cup, commonly referred to as just "World Cup", is an international football competition where men's national teams fight for the golden trophy, as shown above.
This competition is held once every four years.
The Olympics is also held once every four years, alternating with the World Cup, but research shown that there are more viewers for World Cup than the Olympics even though the World Cup consists of only one type of sports.
Currently, the FIFA World Cup Trophy will not be kept permanently by the consistent champion, unlike the previous Jules Rimet Trophy.
[Image taken from: http://www.freewebs.com/julesrimet/biography.htm]
I guess, currently the trophy is under the security of Italy, no country would dare to lose such a symbolic figure and take the blame for it.
I will not go deeply into the format of the competition before World War II
But basically the number of countries qualified for the competition expanded to 24 and then 32, due to the increasing popularity of soccer after World War II
Now on to the Qualification Phase,
For every tournament, FIFA will decide on the number of places given to different national teams under a confederation, or region, for example they give 6 places to Asia and 8 places to Europe. But they decide according to the general strength of the teams under the confederation.
The host of the World Cup receives automatic qualification to the Final Tournament from 1938 onwards, this rule was also effective for the defending champions, but was withdrawn in 2006.
The Final Tournament,
The Qualification phase is a excruciating part of World Cup where the best will be chosen to compete in the Final Tournament. The funny thing is, the qualification phase can start 3-4 years before the Final Tournament.
Well, in the Final Tournament, where everyone is very excited about, I want to divide this tournament into 2 parts.
There is the Group Stage, and there is the Knockout Stage.
In the group stage, teams are divided into 8 groups of 4 teams, where they fight it out. The first and second place of the group will proceed to the Knockout Stage, or in this case, the Round of 16.
In the knockout stage, things become simpler.
For example, the winner of the first group fight with the runner-up of the second group, and so on and so forth
They will eliminate many teams on the way to the semi-finals, where we are left with 4 teams.
The winner of each match will compete with each other in the Grand Finals for the golden trophy, while the loser of the two matches will compete with each other for the Third Place.
