How the World Cup was born: Jules Rimet, FIFA and the dream of a world championship
From Olympic football to the first World Cup in 1930: Jules Rimet's FIFA turned a bold idea into the planet's biggest tournament, which in 2026 brings together 48 teams.
The tournament that in 2026 brings together 48 teams across the United States, Mexico and Canada was born of an idea many considered far-fetched. Its origin goes back to the founding of FIFA in Paris in 1904, when seven European federations dreamed of organised football beyond their borders. The first World Cup was still 26 years away.
The seed was Olympic football. Under the Olympic umbrella, the tournaments of 1908, 1920, 1924 and 1928 proved the popular pull of international football. Uruguay, Olympic champions in Amsterdam 1928 and Paris 1924, dazzled Europe with their play and fuelled the ambition to stage a competition of football's own, open too to the professionals the Games barred.
The driving force was Jules Rimet, FIFA president from 1921 to 1954. Convinced that football could unite peoples, he pushed for an independent world championship. On 28 May 1928, the FIFA Congress meeting in Amsterdam approved the idea: there would be a World Cup, and the first would be played in 1930.
The hosting went to Uruguay on merit. They were the reigning back-to-back Olympic champions, they were celebrating the centenary of their first Constitution, and they offered to cover all the teams' costs and to build a new stadium, the Centenario, for the occasion. Even so, distance took its toll: the long boat crossing deterred much of Europe, and only four teams from the continent —France, Belgium, Romania and Yugoslavia— crossed the Atlantic. Thirteen teams took part in all, with no qualifying round.
On 13 July 1930 the ball started rolling. Frenchman Lucien Laurent scored the first goal in World Cup history, and on 30 July Uruguay were crowned champions by beating Argentina 4-2 in front of almost 70,000 spectators at the Centenario. Rimet's dream had come true.
In 1946, in recognition of his figure, the trophy was renamed the Jules Rimet Cup. From those 13 teams and two different balls in the final has come a 48-team tournament of planetary reach. The seed planted in 1904 and sprouted in 1930 is today the most-watched sporting event in the world.
Source: Wikipedia (Jules Rimet; FIFA; 1930 FIFA World Cup; History of the FIFA World Cup).