Beach soccer

Beach soccer, also known as beach football or beasal, is a variant of association football played on a beach or some form of sand.

The game emphasises skill, agility and shooting at goal.

Whilst football has been played informally on beaches for many years, the introduction of beach soccer was an attempt to codify rules for the game. This was done in 1992 by the founders of Beach Soccer Worldwide, a company set up to develop the sport and responsible for the majority of its tournaments to this day. This was a major foundation for what is now known as beach soccer and what has led to the sport rapidly growing in popularity.

The irregularity of the soft-sand playing surface leads to a totally different style of play than is used in football, with a greater degree of improvisation. The compact field, much smaller than a normal football field, allows players to score from anywhere on the sand, leading to an average of sixty attempts at goal in a single game. With an average of scoring rate of one goal every three or four minutes, around eleven goals are scored in total per game.

World Cup

World Cup commonly refers to:

World Cup can also refer to:

Athletics

Badminton

Bandy

Baseball and softball

Basketball

Chess

Cricket

Equestrian

Football

American football

Association football

FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup

The FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup is an international beach soccer competition contested by the men's national teams of the member associations of FIFA, the sport's global governing body.

The tournament was established in 1995 as the Beach Soccer World Championship, and took place every year under the supervision of Beach Soccer Worldwide (BSWW). Due to the sport's rapid growth, FIFA took over the organization of the competition in 2005 and rebranded it as an official FIFA tournament. Since 2009, the tournament takes place every two years to allow continental tournaments to flourish without the burden of the World Cup qualifiers crowding the schedule. The growing global popularity of beach soccer resulted in FIFA's decision to move the stage of the World Cup from its native home in Brazil to other parts of the globe. The first edition held outside Brazil was in 2008 in Marseille, France.

The current tournament format lasts over a week and involves 16 teams competing initially in four groups of four teams. The group winners and runners-up advance to a series of knockout stages until the final. The losing semi-finalist teams play each other in a play-off match to determine the third-placed team. The most recent edition was held in Espinho, Portugal, and crowned Portugal as champions for the second time – first under the patronage of FIFA – after defeating Tahiti 5–3 in the final.

FIFA World Cup

The 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 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 champion is Germany, which won its fourth title at the 2014 tournament in Brazil.

The current format of the competition involves a qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, to determine which teams qualify for the tournament phase, which is often called the World Cup Finals. 32 teams, including the automatically qualifying host nation(s), compete in the tournament phase for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month.

The 20 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 Germany and Italy, with four titles each; Argentina and inaugural winners Uruguay, with two titles each; and England, France and Spain, with one title each.

2017 World Cup

2017 World Cup may refer to: