The 1998 FIFA World Cup was the 16th FIFA World Cup, the world championship for men's national association football teams. It was held in France from 10 June to 12 July 1998. The country was chosen as the host nation by FIFA for the second time in the history of the tournament, defeating Morocco in the bidding process.

Qualification for the finals began in March 1996 and concluded in November 1997. For the first time in the competition, the group-stages were expanded from 24 teams to 32, with eight groups of four. A total of 64 matches were played in ten stadiums located across ten different host cities, with the opening match and final staged at the Stade de France, Saint-Denis.

The tournament was won by France, who beat Brazil 3–0 in the final. France won their first title, becoming the seventh nation to win a World Cup, and the sixth (after Uruguay, Italy, England, West Germany and Argentina) to win the tournament on home soil.

France was awarded the 1998 World Cup on 2 July 1992 by the executive committee of FIFA during a general meeting in Zurich, Switzerland.

The FIFA World Cup, often simply the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of Fédération 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 champions are Spain, who won the 2010 tournament.

The current format of the tournament involves 32 teams competing for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month  this phase is often called the World Cup Finals. A qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, is used to determine which teams qualify for the tournament together with the host nation(s).

The 19 World Cup tournaments have been won by eight different national teams. Brazil have won five times, and they are the only team to have played in every tournament. The other World Cup winners are Italy, with four titles; Germany, with three titles; Argentina and inaugural winners Uruguay, with two titles each; and England, France, and Spain, with one title each.

A World Cup is a type of sporting competition.

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