- published: 02 Dec 2010
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Sixteen countries have been FIFA World Cup hosts in the competition's twenty tournaments since the inaugural World Cup in 1930. The organization was at first awarded to countries at meetings of FIFA's congress. The choice of location was controversial in the earliest tournaments, given the three-week boat journey between South America and Europe, the two centres of strength in football at the time.
The decision to hold the first cup in Uruguay, for example, led to only four European nations competing. The next two World Cups were both held in Europe. The decision to hold the second of these, the 1938 FIFA World Cup, in France was controversial, as the American countries had been led to understand that the World Cup would rotate between the two continents.
Both Argentina and Uruguay thus boycotted the tournament. The first tournament following World War II, held in Brazil in 1950, had three teams withdrawing due to either financial problems or disagreements with the organization.
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.
FIFA Announces Russia, Qatar as World Cup Hosts for 2018, 2022 (Full Presentation)
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