World Cup Soccer Results

The World Cup is an international (association) football competition contested by national teams of the members of 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 the II World War. The current champion is Germany, which won its fourth title at the 2014 tournament in Brazil.

The 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, which is often called the World Cup Finals. Today, 32 teams including the automatically qualifying host nation, compete in the tournament phase for the title at venues within the host nation over a period of approximately 28 days

The World Cup is the most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world. The cumulative audience of all matches of the 2006 FIFA 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 world.