The Beautiful Game Finds Its Stage: Origins of the FIFA World Cup
This summer, the FIFA World Cup returns to the United States. Spanning 104 matches across 16 cities in three countries — from the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, where the final is set for July 19 — the 2026 tournament is the largest in the competition's 96-year history, with 48 national teams competing for the first time. Dallas alone will host nine matches. Philadelphia, in a fitting gesture of civic symbolism, will stage a game on July 4, the 250th anniversary of American independence. For the millions of fans who will pack these venues and the estimated three-plus billion who will watch from home, the spectacle will feel as natural and permanent as the game itself — an institution that was always going to exist, always going to be this big. That feeling is a pleasant illusion. The World Cup was born not from inevitability but from the obsessive stubbornness of one man, nearly collapsed before its inaugural whistle, and has survived theft, world war, and political manipulation in the nine decades since. Its survival, let alone its current dominance, is stranger than most sports mythology acknowledges.
To understand where the World Cup came from, it helps to understand where football itself came from — which is to say, the industrial towns of Victorian England. The game's codification traces back to 1863, when the Football Association was founded in London and the first standardized rules were written. For the following several decades, international competition was sporadic and provincial: the first recognized international match, between Scotland and England in 1872 in Glasgow, drew a crowd of around 4,000 and ended 0-0 — an appropriately deflating beginning for what would become the planet's most-watched sport. Football spread outward from Britain through the colonial and commercial networks of the British Empire, carried by sailors, engineers, textile workers, and teachers who found in a ball and a muddy pitch something that needed no translation. By the early twentieth century, the game had taken firm root in South America, continental Europe, and beyond. A sport that had been essentially British became, with remarkable speed, a genuinely global phenomenon.
FIFA — the Fédération Internationale de Football Association — was founded in Paris in 1904, initially comprising just seven European associations. For the organization's first two decades, the most prestigious international football competition remained the Olympic Games, where FIFA managed the football tournament on behalf of the International Olympic Committee. This arrangement carried a structural problem that would ultimately fracture the relationship entirely: the Olympics were restricted to amateurs, meaning that the professional players who were genuinely the world's best could not participate. In South America particularly, where the professional game was advancing rapidly, the limitation was felt acutely. The Olympic tournament was excellent but incomplete, a showcase of talent operating under an artificially constrained set of rules about who was and was not permitted to attend.
Into this institutional gap stepped Jules Rimet. The bare biographical facts are, on their surface, unspectacular: born in 1873 in the small village of Theuley in eastern France, son of a grocer, moved to Paris at age eleven, trained as a lawyer, developed a passion for sport. But Rimet was, by every account, a man animated by convictions that went considerably beyond athletic administration. He was a devout Catholic whose values had been shaped by Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical on labor and social dignity, Rerum Novarum, and he had served four years in the trenches of the First World War, emerging with three Croix de Guerre medals and an abiding conviction that the nationalism that had produced that carnage needed a constructive outlet. He had seen, in a French trench, the faces of Senegalese soldiers conscripted from colonial West Africa — men who had traveled to die in a European dispute they had no hand in making. The experience did not make him a radical, but it made him a universalist. Sport, he believed, could do what the League of Nations was attempting to do through diplomacy: bring disparate peoples into proximity, teach them to recognize one another as competitors rather than enemies. Football, because it required no wealth and no infrastructure beyond a level patch of ground, was the most plausible vehicle for that vision.
"Men will be able to meet in confidence without hatred in their hearts and without an insult on their lips." — Jules Rimet — on his vision for international sport, as cited across multiple historical accounts of FIFA's founding years
Rimet became FIFA president in 1921 and spent the following seven years engineering the circumstances that would make an independent world championship possible. He was not operating in a vacuum of enthusiasm. FIFA had harbored ambitions for a global tournament since its founding. But ambition and execution are different things, and Rimet faced meaningful opposition: the British football associations — England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland — had resigned from FIFA entirely over a dispute about payments to amateur players, meaning the very country that had invented and codified the sport was absent from the conversation. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, was hostile to any competition that would challenge the Games' primacy. And within FIFA's own membership, there was deep skepticism about whether a standalone world championship could attract sufficient participation or interest. These were not frivolous objections.
Rimet ignored most of them and persuaded his way around the rest. At the 17th FIFA Congress in Amsterdam in May 1928, he put the question to a vote, and the membership agreed: FIFA would stage its own world championship beginning in 1930. The vice-president of FIFA, Henri Delaunay, captured the underlying logic with a directness that left little room for debate:
"International football can no longer be held within the confines of the Olympics." — Henri Delaunay — FIFA Vice-President, at the 17th FIFA Congress, Amsterdam, May 1928
The host nation was settled without great controversy: Uruguay, the reigning two-time Olympic champion and the most formidable footballing nation on earth at the time, had offered to cover all travel expenses for participating teams — a remarkable financial commitment from a country of barely two million people. The 90,000-capacity Estadio Centenario, designed by architect Juan Scasso, would be built specifically for the occasion, a monument Rimet would later call a "temple of football." Uruguay was also, conveniently, celebrating the centenary of its independence in 1930. The symbolism suited everyone. The logistics, as it turned out, suited almost no one.
Here is the detail that tends to get lost in the celebratory retrospectives: the first World Cup nearly didn't have any Europeans in it. The entry deadline for the 1930 tournament passed in February of that year with not a single European association having officially committed. The primary deterrents were practical and economic — the sea voyage from Europe to Montevideo took approximately two weeks each way, meaning European players would be absent from their domestic clubs for the better part of three months, unpaid and unavailable during a global depression that had already closed banks and shuttered businesses. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Switzerland all declined. And the British associations — England above all — were not even in FIFA at this point, having resigned over the same amateur disputes that had frustrated Rimet for years. The nation that had given the world the game would not be present at its first global championship. An irony so complete it might have been designed.
Rimet intervened personally and with characteristic tenacity. He leveraged his influence within French football to compel France's participation. FIFA's Belgian vice-president did the same for Belgium. Romania's participation came through an intervention almost too absurd to credit: King Carol II, a newly crowned football enthusiast, issued a royal decree ordering Romanian employers to grant paid leave to the national team's players, then used his diplomatic connections to ensure Yugoslavia also sent a squad. By the time the SS Conte Verde set sail from Genoa on June 21, 1930, it carried four European delegations — France, Belgium, Romania, and Yugoslavia — along with FIFA's president himself, who had stashed the tournament's trophy in his personal luggage for the fortnight-long crossing. The trophy, commissioned from French sculptor Abel Lafleur, was made of gold-plated sterling silver and depicted Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, holding aloft a cup. It was, at that moment, the most consequential piece of luggage on any ship at sea. Rimet, by all accounts, was characteristically calm about the responsibility.
Thirteen teams participated in the inaugural tournament — seven from South America, four from Europe, and two from North America, including the United States. The Estadio Centenario, rushed into construction over a rain-soaked winter, was not ready for use until five days into competition; early matches were played at smaller Montevideo club grounds while workers raced to finish the main venue. Uruguay and Argentina were the tournament's dominant forces, dispatching their respective semifinal opponents by identical 6-1 scorelines. The final, played on July 30 before a crowd of somewhere between 68,000 and 93,000 depending on which historical account you consult, was a genuine drama: Argentina led 2-1 at halftime, having scored with what Uruguay's captain maintained was an offside goal, before Uruguay mounted a second-half comeback to win 4-2. Rimet presented the trophy to the head of the Uruguayan Football Association. July 31 was declared a national holiday. In Buenos Aires, the Uruguayan consulate was stoned by disappointed Argentinian fans. Four years of anticipation had produced exactly the kind of spectacle Rimet had imagined — contentious, passionate, and irreducibly human.
The tournament's aftermath confirmed both its promise and its complications. It was agreed the competition would occur every four years. The 1934 edition, hosted in Italy under Benito Mussolini's fascist regime, used the occasion with unsettling facility as a propaganda vehicle — a dimension Rimet was widely accused of ignoring. Uruguay, still aggrieved by the meager European turnout at their own tournament, boycotted entirely, making 1934 the only World Cup in which the defending champions did not participate. The 1938 tournament, held in France, proceeded under the shadow of a continent sliding toward war. And then the war arrived, and the 1942 and 1946 tournaments were cancelled entirely. FIFA itself somehow survived intact, a fact that gave Rimet, by his grandson's account, immense private satisfaction: the League of Nations, the political institution created to maintain precisely the post-war peace that Rimet had been motivated by, had disintegrated. FIFA had not.
In 1946, the organization renamed the trophy in Rimet's honor — the Jules Rimet Trophy — as a gesture of appreciation for his three-decade stewardship of the competition. Rimet stepped down as FIFA president in 1954, having expanded membership from twelve nations to eighty-five. Two years later, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He died in France in October 1956, at the age of 83, two days after his birthday. Brazil won the trophy for the third time in 1970, earning permanent custody of it under the rules then in effect. A new trophy, eighteen-carat gold and the version still awarded today, was commissioned for 1974.
What happened to the original Jules Rimet Trophy is a story that the sport's official hagiography tends to treat as a charming footnote, when in fact it is a genuine caper. In March 1966, four months before England hosted the tournament, the trophy was put on public display at a stamp exhibition in Westminster, London. It was stolen. The theft was brazen and, embarrassingly for English football, never solved — no perpetrators were ever identified or prosecuted. Seven days later, the trophy was found by a dog named Pickles while on a walk in the south London suburb of Upper Norwood, wrapped in newspaper and left beneath a garden hedge. Pickles became briefly famous. His owner collected a reward. The Football Association, apparently not entirely reassured by this sequence of events, quietly commissioned a replica of the trophy and used it for all subsequent exhibition purposes while the real one was kept under considerably tighter security. Whether the replica circulated for years without public disclosure is an institutional question the FA has never enthusiastically revisited.
Brazil, having won the trophy permanently in 1970, kept it in a display case in Rio de Janeiro. In December 1983, it was stolen again. This time there was no Pickles. The trophy has never been recovered. The prevailing theory among investigators — though it has never been conclusively established — is that it was melted down and sold. The most significant physical artifact in the sport's history, the object that Jules Rimet had carried across the Atlantic in his bag, that had been lifted in Montevideo by Uruguay, in Rome by Italy, in Paris by Brazil, that had survived two world wars and been found once by a mixed-breed dog in suburban London, is almost certainly gone. In its place, the FIFA World Football Museum in Zurich displays the trophy's original base, which was miraculously found decades later on a shelf in FIFA's own archive, apparently overlooked for years. The rest is absence. The competition carries forward under a different trophy, and most contemporary fans would be hard-pressed to describe either one. That feels, somehow, appropriate. The tournament was never about the object.
The United States occupies a peculiar position in World Cup history. American players participated in the very first tournament — the US side reached the semifinals in 1930, a result that has never been matched in the ninety-plus years since — yet the country remained a peripheral presence in global football for the better part of the twentieth century. The sport was practiced widely in immigrant communities but failed to penetrate the mainstream sports culture that was shaped by football, baseball, and basketball. This began to shift in 1975, when a sequence of events almost novelistic in its improbability brought the Brazilian legend Pelé to New York.
The New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League) had been lobbying to sign Pelé for years. The Brazilian government, reluctant to let its most celebrated citizen leave, initially blocked the move. Enter Henry Kissinger — the former Secretary of State, longtime soccer obsessive, and German émigré who had, as a child in Fürth, risked confrontations with Nazi toughs to attend matches even after stadiums had posted signs reading "Juden Verboten." Kissinger used his diplomatic connections to facilitate the transfer. In a 1975 press conference at New York's 21 Club, before a crowd of some 300 reporters, Pelé delivered a verdict that felt less like a promotional statement than a declaration:
"You can tell the world that soccer has finally arrived in the USA." — Pelé — press conference, New York, 1975, upon signing with the New York Cosmos
Pelé's three seasons with the Cosmos drew sell-out crowds of 80,000, attracted Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, and George Best to the NASL, and initiated a youth soccer boom that would quietly reshape American athletics over the following decades. The long game worked. Kissinger, who served as honorary chairman of the NASL and worked behind the scenes to help secure the 1994 World Cup bid, understood the sport's potential even when most of his countrymen did not. "Soccer is the fastest growing sport in the United States," he told reporters after a failed 1983 bid to host the 1986 tournament. "To arrange the World Cup would be an enormous opportunity to show the various national styles to the American public."
He was proven right, eventually. USA '94 became, against considerable skepticism, the most financially successful World Cup in the tournament's history to that point — setting attendance records that, remarkably, have not been broken since, despite subsequent tournaments expanding from 24 to 32 teams. An average of nearly 69,000 spectators attended each match. A pre-condition FIFA had imposed for awarding the hosting rights was the creation of a professional domestic league; Major League Soccer launched two years later, in 1996, and is today among the ten highest-attended soccer leagues on earth. The 1994 tournament created, as USMNT veteran Alejandro Bedoya has noted, something genuinely difficult to manufacture artificially: generational fans. Kids who watched that tournament are now taking their own children to stadiums.
Which brings us back to this summer. The 2026 World Cup — co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the first to be shared across three nations — will feature 48 teams, 104 matches, and a final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19. Coldplay will perform at halftime of the final, in a decision inspired, without apparent irony, by the NFL's Super Bowl. The prize fund has been set at a level 50 percent higher than the 2022 Qatar tournament. Dallas will host more matches than any city in the competition's history. Every qualifying confederation in the world, for the first time since 2010, has at least one team in the field.
What would Jules Rimet have made of it? Impossible to say with any certainty, and probably unwise to speculate too cleanly. His grandson Yves remembered him as a "humanist and idealist, who believed that sport could unite the world" — a formulation that sounds, in 2026, both genuinely moving and somewhat naive, given what we know about the corruption scandals that would later shadow FIFA, the political instrumentalization of hosting rights, and the Qatar controversy of 2022. The institution Rimet built has been used to purposes he never imagined, not all of them admirable. His vision survived intact about as well as the trophy he named after himself — recognizable in outline, considerably more complicated in the details.
But the games themselves endure, and they retain something of what he was after. In the summer of 2026, at a stadium in Dallas or Seattle or Miami, a player from a country that may not have existed when the Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen in London will score a goal in front of 80,000 people who have come from dozens of nations to watch. That this will happen — that people who have no common language and share no obvious history will gather voluntarily around a game — is not a small thing. It is, if you are inclined toward Rimet's particular brand of idealism, exactly the point. The beautiful game found its stage in Montevideo in 1930, carried across the ocean in a Frenchman's bag. Ninety-six years on, it is coming back to the country that once needed a diplomat and a legend to convince it the sport was worth watching. The tournament is bigger now, louder, more commercial, more complicated. Rimet would almost certainly have opinions about the halftime show.