This year it will be played for the first time in November and December, i.e. in the middle of the already played season. The world championship in Qatar is accompanied by a series of scandals. The awarding of the championship to this country was already highly controversial.
“It was a wrong choice and I, as president at the time, am responsible for it,” admitted former FIFA president Sepp Blatter in a recent interview. Qatar, which is only slightly larger than the Central Bohemian region, is said to be too small and the World Cup is too big an event for it.
The election itself, in which Blatter also voted to award the championship to Qatar, was to be accompanied by corruption. Also, Qatar is not strictly a footballing country. They are in 58th place in the FIFA rankings, just behind Mali. He will start for the first time at the World Cup. However, the Qatar national team managed to win the last Asian championship.
For the World Cup, the Middle Eastern emirate had to build a completely new infrastructure, including new stadiums. An estimated six and a half thousand workers died during construction. This is also why some fans are calling for a boycott of the championship.
The dominance of the Premier League and Bayern Munich
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Olympic tournament was the pinnacle of football. The championship in Qatar will still be the 22nd FIFA World Cup. At first, only 13 national teams participated.
The World Cup will visit the Middle East for the first time. It was most often played in Europe and South America, but the world’s largest soccer tournament also visited Asia and Africa.
Note: The final standings of each league will be displayed after logging into the world league venue.
32 teams will be represented in Qatar, but the number of participants will increase even more in four years. There will be 48 teams playing in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
The English Premier League will send the most players to Qatar. That is, one of the competitions that has no winter break and is also played in December and January. This year, however, the English championship had to stop. As for the squads, the largest number of teammates will gather in Qatar from the cabin of German Bayern Munich. But Qatar’s Al-Sadd is also sending sixteen representatives.
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The ultimate championship for legends
Two players who have dominated world football in recent years – Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo – will go to their fifth World Cup.
And it will most likely be the last World Cup they will participate in. Furthermore, the draw has prepared a lot of tension for the fans: if Argentina and Portugal win their basic groups, they can only meet in the final.
Both players can rewrite multiple records. Lionel Messi, for example, can surpass Lothar Matthäus in the number of World Cup games played. All that is required is to reach the aforementioned ending.
Paradoxically, both stars aren’t doing very well in terms of shooting at championships. The German Thomas Müller is the best of the shooters who will go again this year to the championship in Qatar. England’s goalscorer Harry Kane is also doing well, having played just six games at the World Cup, scoring six goals.
Discover the history of the World Cup in the following infographic:
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The most successful country ever at the World Cup is Brazil. In total they won five times, most recently in 2002. Czechoslovakia also entered the history of the championship twice. In both cases he made it to the final, in both he failed and won the silver.
The viewership record is held by the United States
This year’s championship will take place in eight completely new stadiums. The final will be hosted by the Lusail Iconic Stadium, which can accommodate up to 80,000 fans. It cannot be compared to, for example, the Maracaná stadium, where the match was played in 1950. There were more than 200,000 spectators at the final match.
However, the largest number of fans visited the world championship held in 1994 in the USA. Over three and a half million spectators reached the stadiums, with an average of over 68,000 at each match.
