2014 FIFA World Cup

The 2014 FIFA World Cup was the 20th FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial world championship for men's national football teams organized by FIFA. It took place in Brazil from 12 June to 13 July 2014, after the country was awarded the hosting rights in 2007. It was the second time that Brazil staged the competition (the first was in 1950), and the fifth time that it was held in South America.

Thirty-one national teams advanced through qualification competitions to join the host nation in the final tournament. A total of 64 matches were played in 12 venues located in as many host cities across Brazil. For the first time at a World Cup finals, match officials used goal-line technology, as well as vanishing foam for free kicks.FIFA Fan Fests in each host city gathered a total of 5 million people, and the country received 1 million visitors from 202 countries.

Every World Cup-winning team since the first edition in 1930 – Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Uruguay – qualified for this tournament. Spain, the title holders, were eliminated at the group stage, along with England and Italy. Uruguay were eliminated in the round of 16, and France exited in the quarter-finals. Brazil, who had won the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, lost to Germany in the semi-finals and eventually finished in fourth place. In the final, Germany defeated Argentina 1–0 to win the tournament and secure the country's fourth world title, the first after the German reunification in 1990, when as West Germany they also beat Argentina in the World Cup final. Germany became the first European team to win a World Cup staged in the Americas, and this result marked the first time that sides from the same continent had won three consecutive tournaments (following Italy in 2006 and Spain in 2010).

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

Brazil

Coordinates: 10°S 52°W / 10°S 52°W / -10; -52

Brazil (ⁱ/brəˈzɪl/; Portuguese: Brasil [bɾaˈziw] ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: República Federativa do Brasil,  listen  ), is the largest sovereign state in both South America and the Latin American region. It is the world's fifth-largest country, both by geographical area and by population. It is the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world, and the only one in the Americas.

Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east, Brazil has a coastline of 7,491 km (4,655 mi). It borders all other South American countries except Ecuador and Chile and occupies 47.3 percent of the continent of South America. Its Amazon River basin includes a vast tropical forest, home to diverse wildlife, a variety of ecological systems, and extensive natural resources spanning numerous protected habitats. This unique environmental heritage makes Brazil one of 17 megadiverse countries, and is the subject of significant global interest and debate regarding deforestation and environmental protection.

FIFA World

FIFA World was a free-to-play massively multiplayer online football game developed by Electronic Arts. It was announced on 9 August 2013 and later an open beta was released on 12 November 2013 in Brazil and Russia. The open beta was made available globally on 20 May 2014, with support in English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish and Turkish.Italian was included with the release of version 9.0 of the game on 5 November 2014. Players could play the game using their keyboard, a combination of their keyboard and mouse or a game controller.

Like with the main releases of FIFA, Lionel Messi featured on promotional images and the title screen of the game. Arda Turan was announced as an ambassador for the game in Turkey on 27 August 2014, with Eden Hazard announced as another ambassador for the video game on 15 September 2014.

FIFA World, along with other EA free-to-play titles Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free, and Need for Speed: World, went offline on 14 July 2015.

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.