A Geeks Guide to Sports: The World Cup

If you follow soccer, even as a casual fan, then you know of the World Cup. The event once every 4 years where 32 nations decide who is the best at soccer.

It's not time yet for another one, but I figured I should explain how the premier international soccer tournament works before moving on to the weirder ones.

The World Cup is started with a group stage where 4 teams play each other once (meaning each team plays 3 games), the 2 teams with the best record after these 4 games moves on to the next round. (Ties are settled by goal differential and who has more goals scored if GD is the same.) What's weird about the World Cup is that the dates and times for the games are chosen before the teams are even known. It's a fair way to decide who plays when but I think it's one of the practices that scares off the big American sports corporations. A sport where you can't make the schedule to favor the more popular teams? Scandalous!

America wins their group in 2010. (1st time since 1930)

The group stage has three games played a day (i.e. two games from Group A one game from Group B, the next day: one game from Group B, two games from Group C) except for in the third games. The third games are 4 to a day. (all teams from Group A and B one day, the next all teams in Group C and D play.) This is because of the infamous match in 1982 between Austria and Germany. In this match Austria and Germany were the last match in the group, and they knew they could both get through if German only won by one or two goals, so after an early goal by Germany, both teams played a game of pass. There have been other examples but this is the most famous.

After the group stage the knockout rounds begins the winner of one group plays the runner up of the group next door. In 2010 it was America (winners of Group C) vs Ghana (runner-up of Group D), and England (runner up of Group C) vs Germany (winners of Group D). This winner advances, loser goes home format continues until the semi-finals. The final four teams are guaranteed to get to play two final matches. The two losers play for 3rd place. A quick note only two teams from outside of Europe and South America have ever been in the final four. They are America in 1930 (third place) and South Korea in 2002 (Fourth Place). The furthest an African team has ever gotten is the quarter-finals (3 times all since 1990), although Ghana last year was denied getting into the final four by a hand ball from Uruguay. Oceania has only had one representative get out of the group stage. (Australia was this one representative in 2006, this was also the last year they were in Oceania, they now play as part of Asia.)

There have only been 8 different champions in the 19 World Cups that have been staged. 5 for Brazil, 4 for Italy, 3 for Germany, 2 for Argentina and Uruguay, 1 for England, France, and Spain.

The World cup will next be in Brazil in 2014. Then in Russia in 2018, and Qatar in 2022 (You've probably heard me complain quite a bit about this one).

Now for a weird bit of history the FIFA World Cup (on the left) is not the first trophy given out to the victor. The Jules Rimet trophy (on the right) was the original award. And was given (as in to keep) to the first team to win the tournament 3 times. This was Brazil. After this two things happened. A) A new trophy was designed for the victors (it's current incarnation) and B) The trophy was stolen from the Brazilian Football Association. There are two theories as to it's where abouts. One says that thieves melted it down. The other says that a drug lord has it sitting in his office. Not to mention this little statue survived World War II in a shoe box. And was stolen in 1966 and rescued by a dog named Pickles who dug it up from under a tree. I hope for the drug lord theory it be a shame for such a weird history to come to an end just to be melted down to a gold bar.

Well hope this helped it's not really as hard to understand as the Champions League set up, but I think it's probably the one people are most likely to encounter when getting interested in the sport. Plus being an American means you've more then likely already have two teams you can cheer for. First team USA, 2nd the land your ancestors came from. I cheer for Germany not just because both sides of my family have roots there but because I lived over there and it's where I discovered the game. Have fun hopefully we can look forward to a great 2014 for all our teams.