June 5, 2015

Soccer’s World Cup tournament for women, held every four years to determine the best team in international soccer, begins tomorrow.  The first match features the team of the host country, Canada, against China.

Nigeria’s Asisat Oshoala leaps over Germany’s goalkeeper, Meike Kaemper, during the Women’s World Cup final in Montreal, Canada, in 2014. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Paul Chiasson)

The tournament runs from June 6 to July 5 and will be held in five Canadian cities: Edmonton, in Alberta; Moncton, in New Brunswick; Montreal, in Quebec; Ottawa, the nation’s capital, in Ontario; Vancouver, in British Columbia; and Winnipeg, in Manitoba. The first match will be held in Edmonton. Favorites for this tournament include the teams from the United States, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, and Brazil.

The tournament comes at a difficult time for international soccer. Over the past weeks, officials from the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) have been arrested and charged with corruption. Last week, the organization’s president, Sepp Bladder, announced that he would resign as soon as an election could be held to choose his replacement. This announcement came only five days after Bladder was reelected to his fifth term as FIFA president.

Other World Book articles:

• Association football
• President of FIFA Announces He Will Step Down
• Soccer Officials Arrested in Corruption Scandal

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July 1, 2014

Every four years, national all-star teams from 32 countries compete for soccer's World Cup trophy (© Alfredo Lopez, Jam Media/LatinContent/Getty Images).

It has been a long slog for lovers of “the beautiful game,” but the United States may finally have become a nation that knows and cares how its soccer team—which the rest of the world calls a football team—fares in the World Cup. The World Cup tournament is governed by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), and it was first held in 1930. Since then, every four years (except 1942 and 1946) a World Cup tournament has been held to determine the world’s soccer champion. This year’s World Cup games are in Brazil, and the U.S. team has played well there.

Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, but it has been slow to catch on in the United States, where baseball, basketball, and American football hold much greater sway. Salon magazine recently reported that when the U.S. team last played a World Cup game in Brazil in 1950, only one American reporter covered the game. For the next 40 years, the U.S. team did not even qualify for World Cup play; it only rejoined the tournament in 1990. FIFA granted the United States the right to host the 1994 World Cup with the agreement that the United States would form a professional soccer league—Major League Soccer (MLS).

Since the 1990′s, U.S. interest in soccer has been slowly building. In addition to World Cup interest, other factors increased soccer’s popularity. A growing population of Hispanic Americans who grew up with the game as their primary sport live in the United States. Further, millions of Americans played soccer as young children over the last four decades, and those Americans have grown up with an appreciation for the game.

In 2014, there are more than 100 American reporters and news teams covering the World Cup tournament. The initial three World Cup matches played by the United States in 2014 (against Ghana, Portugal, and Germany) averaged some 18 million television viewers each, more than the number of people who watched last year’s World Series final game or NBA finals.

Yesterday, the U.S. team, nicknamed the Yanks, faced Belgium’s Red Devils in the knockout round. The World Cup is organized first into a group stage, in which 32 teams, placed in groups of 4, play 3 games each. Teams are awarded points for their performance in this stage. From that stage, the 16 teams with the highest point totals enter the knockout round. In that phase, each game played determines who will continue in the tournament and who is knocked out of competition. Belgium beat the United States 2-1 in overtime in what many sportscasters considered to be the most exciting match of the tournament. Team USA is finished for this World Cup, but their fans are eagerly awaiting 2018′s tournament in Moscow.

Other World Book articles:

• Football, Association
• Soccer (a Back in Time article-1994)
• Soccer (a Back in Time article-2010)

June 12, 2014

The World Cup Finals, the biggest single-event sports competition in the world, kicked off today in Brazil. The tournament will involve 32 countries whose teams will play 64 games in 12 cities over 32 days. The final match is scheduled for July 13 in Rio de Janeiro. Television viewership of the soccer championship is expected to be the highest in history, surpassing the 3.2 billion people who watched the 2010 games, according to the FIFA, the international governing body of association football. A description of the World Cup as “the planet’s single greatest collective human experience” by sports writer Roger Bennett captures the fervor aroused by the tournament.

The World Cup is the most important international competition in soccer. Every four years national all-star teams from 32 countries compete for the trophy. (© Alfredo Lopez, Jam Media/LatinContent/Getty Images)

Football, or soccer, is known as "the beautiful game." (© Jose Jordan, AFP/Getty Images)

The United States is one of four countries from North and Central America to reach the final round of play in the 2014 tournament. The other qualifying teams are from Costa Rica, Honduras, and Mexico. The United States has qualified for every World Cup since 1990. The U.S. team plays it first match on Monday, June 16, against Ghana.

The 2014 World Cup, the most expensive ever staged, has been highly controversial. Surveys found that more than half of Brazilians–perhaps as many as two out of every three residents–opposed the tournament. Across Brazil, demonstrators have protested the enormous cost of hosting the event–$11 billion–which they claim would have been better spent on hospitals, public housing, and schools. In 2013, an estimated 1 million people joined demonstrations across Brazil, protesting an event that offers no economic advantage to the vast majority of Brazil’s population. Today in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, police used tear gas to break up a demonstration. Protesters were attempting to block a road leading to the stadium where the opening ceremony took place. Near the stadium, some 3,000 families are camping in a squatter settlement known as the “People’s Cup,” hoping to use the global event as a platform to pressure the government to provide better public services. Elsewhere in the city, riot police used tear gas and rubber truncheons to disperse protesters outside a subway station on the route to the same arena.

Additional World Book articles:

• Tim Cahill
• Lionel Messi
• Neymar
• Cristiano Ronaldo