Information on Football Teams for the World Cup

The governing body of international football (soccer) is the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). In 2007, FIFA had 208 member countries. Every four years, FIFA hosts the World Cup competition in which 32 of the 208 national teams compete to become the number one team in the world.

  1. Process

    • The first round of the world cup includes all 32 qualifying teams. There are eight groups of four teams each. The four teams compete against one another to determine first-through-fourth-place rankings. The first- and second-place teams from each group advance to the round of 16. In this round, there are eight games, in which the first-place team of one group plays a match against the second-place team of another group. The winner of each match moves on to the quarterfinals, where there are four games with four winners. The four winners move on to the semifinals, where the teams are further dwindled down to two. The remaining two teams face off in the finals.

    Countries

    • The 32 teams are the finalists from the conference qualifiers. FIFA has six continental conferences, each of which has their own qualifying process for the World Cup. The countries that qualified for the 2010 World Cup were Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, United States, England, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Ghana, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

    Players

    • Players of note in the 2010 World Cup include Lionel Messi from Argentina, Kaka from Brazil and Cristiano Ronaldo from Portugal. Messi has scored 13 goals in 44 appearances with the national team and 88 goals in regular league games with Spanish League team Barcelona. ESPN ranks him the number one player in the 2010 World Cup. Kaka signed his first professional contract in 2001 at age 15 with the Brazilian club Sao Paulo. Kaka received the 2007 Ballon D'or (European Footballer of the Year) and the 2009 FIFA World Footballer of the Year. ESPN ranks Ronaldo from Portugal as the second top player in the World Cup. He was the 2008 FIFA World Footballer of the Year.

    Favorites

    • The favorite teams for the 2010 World Cup include England, Italy, Spain, Brazil, France, Argentina, Germany, Netherlands, Brazil and Spain. England won nine out of 10 matches it played to qualify for the World Cup. Germany is a seven-time World Cup finalist and a three-time winner. The Netherlands won all eight games it played to qualify for the World Cup. Italy is the reigning champion and four-time winner of the cup. Brazil has won the World Cup five times.

    Trivia

    • Maradona, Argentina's coach, coached his first World Cup game ever in the team's 2010 World Cup opening match against Nigeria, which is the last national team he played against as a player in the 1994 World Cup. Denmark's coach, Morten Olsen, has coached the national team for 10 years. None of the other coaches in the World Cup has coached his team this long. The last time Brazil did not make the quarterfinals of the World Cup was in 1966.