Football
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word football normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly called football include association football (known as soccer in some countries); gridiron football (specifically American football or Canadian football); Australian rules football; rugby football (either rugby union or rugby league); and Gaelic football. These various forms of football share to varying extent common origins and are known as football codes.
There are a number of references to traditional, ancient, or prehistoric ball games played in many different parts of the world. Contemporary codes of football can be traced back to the codification of these games at English public schools during the 19th century. The expansion and cultural influence of the British Empire allowed these rules of football to spread to areas of British influence outside the directly controlled Empire. By the end of the 19th century, distinct regional codes were already developing: Gaelic football, for example, deliberately incorporated the rules of local traditional football games in order to maintain their heritage. In 1888, The Football League was founded in England, becoming the first of many professional football competitions. During the 20th century, several of the various kinds of football grew to become some of the most popular team sports in the world.
List of Championship
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 the 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 France, which won its second title at the 2018 tournament in Russia.
The current format involves a qualification phase, which takes place over the preceding three years, to determine which teams qualify for the tournament phase. In the tournament phase, 32 teams, including the automatically qualifying host nation(s), compete for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over about a month.
Year | Host | champion |
---|---|---|
2018 | Russia | France |
2014 | Brazil | Germany |
2010 | South Africa | Spain |
2006 | Germany | Italy |
2002 | South Korea, Japan | Brazil |
1998 | France | France |
1994 | United States | Brazil |
1990 | Italy | West Germany |
1986 | Mexico | Argentina |
1982 | Spain | Italy |
1978 | Argentina | Argentina |
1974 | West Germany | West Germany |
1970 | Mexico | Brazil |
1966 | England | England |
1962 | Chile | Brazil |
1958 | Sweden | Brazil |
1954 | Switzerland | West Germany |
1950 | Brazil | Uruguay |
1938 | France | Italy |
1934 | Italy | Italy |
1930 | Uruguay | Uruguay |