FIFA WORLD CUP , WHAT'S SO SPECIAL?

The FIFA World Cup, often simply called the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the senior men's national teams of the members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the sport's global governing body. The current format involves aqualification phase, which takes place over the preceding three years, to determine which teams qualify for the tournament phase. In the tournament phase, 32 teams, including the automatically qualifying host nation(s), compete for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over about a month.The 21 World Cup tournaments have been won by eight national teams.Brazilhave won five times, and they are the only team to have played in every tournament. The other World Cup winners areGermanyandItaly, with four titles each;Argentina,France, and inaugural winnerUruguay, with two titles each; andEnglandandSpain, with one title each.The World Cup is the most prestigious association football tournament in the world, as well as the most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even theOlympic Games. The cumulative viewership of all matches of the2006 World Cupwas estimated to be 26.29 billion with an estimated 715.1 million people watching thefinal match, a ninth of the entire population of the planet.