THE WORLD CUP IS OVER: THE FACTS ARE NOT....SOME CLASSICS HERE

 Crazy Facts About World Cup: (bear in mind the 2022 edition has not yet finished)

Only two continents have succeeded as champions of the FIFA World Cup: Europe and South America. In fact, of the 20 World Cups (thus far), European countries have been finalists in 18 of them. 

As of the 2018 World Cup, 79 national teams have competed in the final tournaments. This will become 80 after Qatar makes its debut in 2022.

Mexico has qualified without winning the World Cup tournaments more than any other country (16 times). They’ve even been the host country twice in 1970 and 1986. 

The country with the smallest population to ever compete in the FIFA World Cup is Iceland (population: 334,000). QATAR population = 2.931 m

Among the national teams, Germany has played the most World Cup matches (106) and appeared in the most finals (8), semi-finals (13), and quarter-finals (16) as well as scored the most World Cup goals (224), while Brazil has appeared in the most World Cups (20).

One of the fun World Cup facts involves the penalty shootout of the great Italian footballer Giuseppe Meazza. In the year 1938, he got a chance of a penalty kick against Brazil. Unfortunately, while he was about to do so, his shorts fell down. Despite this malfunction, he picked up his shorts and made the goal beating the goalkeeper, who was still laughing. This goal pushed Italy into the finals.

Uruguay in 1950 is the only team to have won the World Cup finals without winning the final match. This is because FIFA changed the rules for that competition only. Rather than teams going from a group stage to a knockout format, the teams when into another group. It just so happened that the final match was between the only two sides that could win the competition, hosts Brazil and 1930 winners Uruguay. Despite being heavy favourites, Brazil went down 2-1.

Zinedine Zindane abruptly charged at the Italian defender Marco Materazzi during the final match of the 2006 tournament, striking him with a head butt. Zidane, who is of Algerian descent, shocked spectators and commentators with the bizarre assault, which prompted some to believe the player was responding to a racial epithet. A few days later, Matterazi admitted to insulting the Frenchman’s sister. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phCws4VKPyY should be some more incidents here.

The only player ever to be sent off on his birthday was Italian forward, Gianfranco Zola.

New Zealand is the only team to go unbeaten in the 2010 World Cup as they drew all 3 of their group stage games. The winners of the tournament, Spain, lost their 1st group stage match to Switzerland.

A European nation has won the past four World Cups and five of the last six – Brazil being the only non-European country to succeed.

In 2002, the FIFA World Cup tournament was held in two countries – South Korea and Japan.