2018 FIFA World Cup

The 2018 FIFA World Cup will be the 21st FIFA World Cup, a quadrennial international football tournament contested by the men's national teams of the member associations of FIFA. It is scheduled to take place in Russia from 14 June to 15 July 2018, after the country was awarded the hosting rights on 2 December 2010. This will be the first World Cup held in the area of the former Soviet Union and the first to be held in Europe since 2006.

The final tournament will involve 32 national teams, which include 31 teams determined through qualifying competitions and the automatically qualified host team. A total of 64 matches will be played in 12 venues located in 11 cities. The final is expected to take place in Moscow at the Luzhniki Stadium.

The winners will qualify for the 2021 FIFA Confederations Cup.

Host selection

The bidding procedure to host the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups began in January 2009, and national associations had until 2 February 2009 to register their interest. Initially, nine countries placed bids for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, but Mexico later withdrew from proceedings, and Indonesia's bid was rejected by FIFA in February 2010 after the Indonesian government failed to submit a letter to support the bid. During the bidding process, the three remaining non-UEFA nations (Australia, Japan, and the United States) gradually withdrew from the 2018 bids, and the UEFA nations were thus ruled out of the 2022 bid. As such, there were eventually four bids for the 2018 FIFA World Cup: England, Russia, Netherlands/Belgium, and Spain/Portugal.

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

2018 FIFA World Cup qualification

The 2018 FIFA World Cup qualification process will decide 31 of the 32 teams which will play in the 2018 FIFA World Cup, with the hosts Russia qualifying automatically. All 208 remaining FIFA member associations are eligible to enter the qualifying process. For the first time in World Cup history, all national teams registered for the preliminary competition.Bhutan and South Sudan made their FIFA World Cup qualification debuts.

While the main qualifying draw took place at the Konstantinovsky Palace in Strelna, Saint Petersburg on 25 July 2015, a number of qualification matches were played before that. The first began in Dili, Timor-Leste on 12 March as part of the AFC's qualification, with East Timorese player Chiquito do Carmo scoring the first goal of qualification. Matches were also played in CONCACAF prior to the main draw.

Qualified teams

Qualification process

The number of teams participating in the final tournament is 32. Even though the qualification process began in March 2015, the allocation of slots for each confederation was discussed by the FIFA Executive Committee on 30 May 2015 in Zürich after the FIFA Congress. It was decided that the same allocation as 2014 would be kept for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments.

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.