Year Host Winning Team Captain Head coach

1930 Uruguay Uruguay José Nasazzi Alberto Suppici

1934 Italy Italy Giampiero Combi Vittorio Pozzo

1938 France Italy Giuseppe Meazza Vittorio Pozzo

1950 Brazil Uruguay Obdulio Varela Juan López

West Sepp
1954 Fritz Walter
Switzerland Germany Herberger

1958 Sweden Brazil Hilderaldo Bellini Vicente Feola

Aymoré
1962 Chile Brazil Mauro Ramos
Moreira

1966 England England Bobby Moore Alf Ramsey

Carlos Alberto
1970 Mexico Brazil Mário Zagallo
Torres

The world cup was first held in 1930, when FIFA president Jules Rimet decided to stage an
international football tournament. The inaugural edition, held in Uruguay in 1930, was contested as a final tournament of
only 13 teams invited by the organization. Since then, the FIFA World Cup has experienced successive expansions and
format remodeling to its current 32-team final tournament preceded by a two-year qualifying process, involving almost 200
teams from all over the world.

The first official international football match was played in 1872 in Glasgow between Scotland and England,[1] although at this
stage the sport was rarely played outside Great Britain.

However by 1900 the sport had gained ground all around the world and national football associations were being founded.
The first official international match outside of the British Isles was played between Uruguay and Argentina in Montevideo on
July 1902.[2] FIFA was founded in Paris on 22 May 1904 – comprising football associations from France, Belgium (the
preceding two teams having played their first international against each other earlier in the month), Denmark, the
Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, with Germany pledging to join. [3]

As soccer began to increase in popularity, it was contested as an IOC-recognised Olympic sport at the 1900 and 1904
Summer Olympics, as well as at the 1906 Intercalated Games, before becoming an official FIFA-supervised Olympic
competition at the 1908 Summer Olympics.[4] Organised by England's Football Association, the event was for amateur
players only and was regarded suspiciously as a show rather than a competition. The England national amateur football
team won the event in both 1908 and 1912.

There was an attempt made by FIFA to organize an international football tournament between nations outside of the
Olympic framework in 1906 and this took place in Switzerland. These were very early days for international football and the
official history of FIFA describes the competition as having been a failure.

With the Olympic event continuing to be contested only between amateur teams, competitions involving professional teams
also started to appear. The Torneo Internazionale Stampa Sportiva, held in Turin, Italy in 1908, was one of the first and the
following year Sir Thomas Lipton organised the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy, also held in Turin. Both tournaments were
contested between individual clubs (not national teams), each one of which represented an entire nation. For this reason,
neither was really a direct forerunner of the World Cup, but notwithstanding that, the Thomas Lipton Trophy is sometimes
described as The First World Cup,[5] at the expense of its less well-known Italian predecessor.

In 1914, FIFA agreed to recognise the Olympic tournament as a "world football championship for amateurs", [6] and took
responsibility for organising the event. This led the way for the world's first intercontinental football competition, at the 1920
Summer Olympics, won by Belgium.[7] Uruguay won the tournaments in 1924 and 1928.
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 peoplThe 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 ofFédération 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 Germany,
which won its fourth title at the2014 tournament in Brazil.e watching the final match, a ninth of the entire population of the
planet.[1][2][3][4]