Ranking all the World Cups in history
With international football firmly back on the radar this week due to the World Cup qualifiers taking place (let’s go England!) and the club season now over, it seems like as good a time as any to take a look at the history of the World Cup, the greatest tournament in all of sports for my money.
I’m going to be trying to rank each tournament in order of how memorable it was. I’ll preface this by saying that it hasn’t been at all easy – after all, I was born in 1984 and outside of some shadowy memories of Italia ’90, the first World Cup I can remember watching was USA ’94. With that said, there probably aren’t that many people alive right now who can properly remember Uruguay 1930 anyway! So armed with plenty of clips and information on all of the tournaments, here goes nothing...
#20 Italy 1934
Okay, I’ll be frank about this. I’ve got this ranked bottom because by all accounts, Italy 1934 – like the Berlin Olympics of 1936 – was largely used as a backdrop to promote fascism, which obviously is a huge, huge negative. Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini was desperate to use football as a way to persuade the masses to support his government and so hosting the World Cup was the perfect route to achieving that.
With that in mind, is it any surprise that Italy ran out eventual winners, beating Czechoslovakia 2-1 in the final? Probably not, as reports suggest that corruption and bribery in favour of the hosts ran riot throughout the tournament, helping them to all four of their victories – over the USA, Spain, Austria and finally the Czechs – after the referees had “special meetings” with Mussolini.
The tournament ran as a sixteen-team knockout competition; qualifiers were used to thin down a field of 36, and it saw the debut of sides like Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, all of whom would go on to become major powers in the game. But reigning champions Uruguay didn’t compete, nor did any of the British nations, who were content to compete in their own International Championship.
1934 stands as the only World Cup not to feature its reigning champions and thus it’s #20 on my list.
#19 France 1938
The shadow of World War II loomed over France 1938, evident by the fact that Spain – in the grip of their civil war – were banned from entering, but more so because Austria (who had qualified) had been united with Hitler’s Germany in the infamous anschluss, forcing them to withdraw. A replacement was not invited to participate and so Sweden received a bye into the quarter-finals (the tournament had the same sixteen-side knockout format as 1934).
Like 1934, the World Cup was seen by Mussolini as the perfect opportunity to force the world to take him – and Italy – as seriously as Hitler, and so unsurprisingly, there was pressure on the Italian team to retain the trophy. So much so that Mussolini supposedly sent his players a telegram on the morning of the final warning them to “win or die!”
Win they did – the Italians defeated Hungary 4-2 in the final, but question marks hang over the match, particularly as the Hungarian goalkeeper Antal Szabo claimed, “I may have let in four goals, but at least I saved their lives.”
With fascism again overshadowing the tournament and large sides such as England, Argentina, Spain and Uruguay missing, 1938’s another one that ranks low.