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    The World Cup: A Short History
    The World Cup: A Short History
    The World Cup: A Short History
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    The World Cup: A Short History

    By Rupert Colley

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    The World Cup: A Short History


    The FIFA World Cup is undoubtedly football’s greatest tournament. ‘The World Cup: A History’ chronicles, as the title implies, the history of the competition, tournament by tournament.

    Written by History In An Hour’s founder, Rupert Colley, The World Cup: A Short History takes the reader from Jules Rimet’s vision and the inaugural tournament in 1930 to the current 2018 World Cup in Russia. Along the way we meet the illustrious names of yesteryear – from Leonidas, Puskas and Fontaine via Pele, Beckenbauer and Cruyff to the great players of recent years.

    The World Cup: A Short History includes a list of records (the youngest, the oldest, the fastest, the most, etc), and a chapter on the Women’s FIFA World Cup.

    Plus, test your knowledge with the 40-question ultimate World Cup Quiz.

    Whether you call it football or soccer, 'The World Cup: A Short History is a must for a superb overview to the ultimate sporting spectacle.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRupert Colley
    Release dateNov 11, 2016
    ISBN9781540146182
    The World Cup: A Short History
    Author

    Rupert Colley

    Rupert Colley was a librarian in Enfield for 22 years until September 2011. A history graduate, he launched the original History In An Hour in 2009 with a website, blog and ‘World War Two In An Hour’ as an iPhone app. He then expanded it to Kindle, iBooks and into the USA with a series of titles, and enlisted new writers by encouraging guest bloggers on the website. History In An Hour was acquired by HarperCollins in 2011.

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      Book preview

      The World Cup - Rupert Colley

      Introduction

      On Thursday 14 June 2018 the opening match of the 21st  FIFA World Cup* will take place between hosts, Russia, and Saudi Arabia at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium. 88 years earlier, on 13 July 1930, Mexico and France and USA and Belgium played the opening matches of the first World Cup tournament, both games taking place in the city of Montevideo, capital of Uruguay.

      Over the course of two years, 210 nations took part in this year’s World Cup qualification until 31 teams were left to join the hosts in Russia.

      Only thirteen nations took part in 1930; no qualification was needed, and with no representatives from Africa or Asia, the name ‘World Cup’ seemed somewhat a misnomer.

      However, we would be mistaken to consider the game of 88 years ago any less popular than it is today. It still attracted as much passion and fury as it does now, and at a time when nationalism was a by-product of the global consciousness, perhaps more so.

      For the first FIFA World Cup Final, which took place on 30 July 1930, an estimated 90,000 crammed in to see the hosts, Uruguay, beat their South American rivals Argentina 4-2. So incensed at their loss, Argentinian fans in Buenos Aires stoned the Uruguayan embassy denting diplomatic relations between the two nations.

      The stars of yesteryear were as much revered as they are now. Leonidas, Ademir, Puskas, Fontaine and Ghiggia were, each of them, as famous in their day as Pele, Moore, Beckenbauer and Cruyff were in recent decades and Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar and Kane are now.

      The FIFA World Cup of 2018 will bring out the best and the worst of players, managers, officials and fans alike. Players, known only within their home nations, will become overnight stars throughout the world; others will suffer vilification, while some will exit the world stage following this tournament. There will be great excitement, unbearable tension, utter delight and crushing despair. There will be epic games that will live in the memory and the dull we’d rather forget. And, at the end of it, one nation only will hold the World Cup aloft. We know all this because it happens at every tournament.

      The following book is not a comprehensive history of the competition – you will not learn the name of Bulgaria’s outside right in 1962, nor who scored the second goal in Yugoslavia’s 9-0 win over Zaire in 1974. But you will get a good overview of the world’s ultimate sporting occasion, the games that mattered, its superstars and its villains. 

      This, in an hour or so, is the history of the FIFA World Cup.

      ––––––––

      *(‘FIFA’, ‘World Cup’ and ‘FIFA World Cup’ are trade marks of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association).

      Background

      It was the Olympics, not the World Cup, which gave the world its first global champions of football. During the London Olympics of 1908, Great Britain defeated Denmark to win the first gold medal for football. Four years later, in 1912, in Stockholm, Britain retained the gold, again beating Denmark.

      Participating teams at these early Olympics were amateur. 1908 saw the world’s first international competition for professional clubs – The Sport Press International Tournament, a four-team competition held in Italy and won by Servette FC from Switzerland. Twenty-four years earlier, in 1884, the British nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, had staged the world’s first international football competition, the British Home Championship (won by Scotland). The first international match had taken place twelve years before, in 1872 at Glasgow’s Hamilton Crescent, a game, watched by 4,000, between Scotland and England which ended 0-0.

      Britain did not compete at the post-First World War Olympics, which took place in Antwerp in 1920 where hosts Belgium won gold by beating Spain. Uruguay dominated the Olympics of 1924 and 1928, winning the gold both times, beating Switzerland and Argentina respectively, the latter after a replay. But by the late 1920s, disagreements arose over the status of the players. Most of the leading players were, by now, professional and therefore disqualified from taking part in the staunchly amateur Olympics. The Olympic Champions could hardly be considered world champions if most of the best players were absent. So, as a compromise, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) offered, in 1928, to pay the players a fee to make up for lost wages while playing at the Games. The decision displeased Great Britain who, insisting that the Games should maintain its amateur status, boycotted the Games of 1928.

      Football, it was decided, needed its own competition.

      Founded twenty-four years earlier, in 1904, FIFA (Federation of International Football Associations) met in May 1928 and set the date two years hence for staging the first World Cup. Four European nations applied to host the tournament but the honour fell to Uruguay, partly because they were the current Olympic Champions (having beaten Argentina in the 1928 final) and partly to commemorate Uruguay’s hundredth anniversary of independence which would take place in 1930. The fact that Uruguay offered to pay the expenses of all competing nations probably helped.

      Any nation belonging to FIFA could take part, but FIFA president, Jules Rimet, struggled to find European members prepared to endure the two-week Atlantic crossing to South America. Annoyance that Uruguay should be chosen as hosts may also have played a part. The British nations, having joined FIFA in 1905, had withdrawn their membership as part of the protest against the payment of Olympic footballers and therefore were not eligible to enter.

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