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 the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). 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 World War II.

The current format involves a qualification phase, which takes place over the preceding three years for all of the national teams all over the world under FIFA, to determine which teams are qualified 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.

There have been a total of 21 World Cup tournaments to be organized so far with eight national teams to be honored. Among them, Brazil is now the best team that has 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, France, and inaugural winner Uruguay, with two titles each; England and Spain, with one title each.

The World Cup is considered the most prestigious association football tournament in the world, as well as the most widely viewed and followed single sporting event in the world. The cumulative viewership of all matches of the 2006 World Cup was estimated to be 26.29 billion with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the final match, a ninth of the entire population of the planet.