The First World Cup

In honor of its having won two world championships at the past two Olympics already, Uruguay was designated as the host country of the inaugural FIFA World Cup. Eager at the prospect of hosting the event, Uruguay had a new 100,000 spectator stadium erected, the Estadio Centenario; but this host nation decision meant that it would require some convincing for the invited European countries to send their teams across the Atlantic Ocean on the three week journey by boat to the host country, ultimately having to spend two months away from home just to compete in the championship - especially still in the midst of the Great Depression. Although Uruguay offered to pay the costs of travel and housing for the reluctant teams, it took until two months before the competition began for any of them to pledge their participation. England still refused to associate itself with any tournament that would call for their adaptation to new rules and regulations by other countries regarding a sport they felt responsible for creating and promoting. Ultimately, France, Belgium, Romania, and Yugoslavia wound up participating as the only four teams from Europe, along with seven teams from South America (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru) and two teams from North America (Mexico and the United States) - making the first World Cup a world championship competition among a total of thirteen intercontinental nations.

On the first day of the tournament, France's Lucien Laurent scored the first goal in the history of the World Cup championship, and the first two matches resulted in France beating Mexico and the United States beating Belgium. However, Uruguay - already considered to be world soccer champions as a result of their two Olympic wins - won against Argentina in the final round, becoming the first official World Cup Champions in the history of the competition. 93,000 spectators had gathered to watch the historic event.

When the time came for the Summer Olympics in 1932, soccer was intended to be left out of the competition, since the sport was not especially popular in the United States, where the games were being held in Los Angeles that year. When the Olympics brought back soccer as an event in the 1936 Summer Olympics, their competition had become dwarfed by the prestige of the World Cup, despite some shaky beginnings due to the challenges of travel and war that the championship faced in its initial years. (To date, 1896 and 1932 have been the only two years in Summer Olympic history during which soccer was not included - and in 1996, women's soccer also became an Olympic event - but soccer has never reached the heights of being considered a top-level Olympic game.)

Since that inaugural tournament, the FIFA World Cup has become the most widely viewed sports award championship in the world, attracting an even larger television audience than the Olympic Games. The first World Cup had 513,000 live spectators across matches, and 93,000 spectators for the finals; now, the tournament's 64 matches draw as many as nearly 3 million live spectators. The first television broadcast of the World Cup took place in 1954, broadcasting from Switzerland, and has since drawn an international television audience as large as over 35 billion viewers for all the year's matches combined - with over 43,000 broadcasts showing over 73,000 hours of coverage on almost 400 channels in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. In past years, as many as 1.3 billion viewers all over the world have tuned in to watch the finals round alone.

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