All Time Stats

All time stats regarding FIFA World Cup should prove it that this tournament is truly a huge deal. Billions of spectators every year (or, rather, every four years), hundreds of matches played and thousands of goals.

The numbers can get blown out of proportion if we count the qualification matches in as well, since they’re related to the World Cup too and wouldn’t happen if there was no such tournament in the first place.

Now that FIFA World Cup 2018 Russia is taking place, people and football fans from all around the world have their eyes fixed on Russia where 32 finalists will meet over the course of one month to decide which team will be the 21st winner of the most prestigious national football trophy in the world.

FIFA World Cup All Time Stats

If we take the single year of 2018, there were already hundreds of matches played and after 15 July, that number will have almost reached one thousand.

Most of these matches are, of course, the qualifiers and most of the teams that participated in them didn’t make it to the World Cup 2018 itself. However, this just proves how much of a deal this is, how grand its scale is and how much is going on behind the scenes.

If we take a look at the goals scored in the World Cups throughout the years, the number would be tens of thousands.

Even without qualifiers, the number of goals scored in the finals and the group stages during the last twenty tournaments since 1930 is over two and a quarter thousand, with almost three goals per match on average throughout the World Cup history.

Most Successful World Cup Teams of All Time

Taking a more specific look at the teams, it becomes quickly apparent that there are two clear leaders on the list. One of them is Brazil and the other, you guessed it right, is Germany.

Brazil has participated in every single FIFA World Cup tournament that has ever taken place since the very first one in 1930, in Uruguay. Not only that, Brazil never failed to advance to the round of 16 (or its equivalent before it was a thing) either.

Obviously, we probably don’t need to say that it’s also a team with the most trophy wins, which happened five times.

A few teams are running on their heels and Germany is one of them. Although they didn’t participate in every single tournament that there was and won only four times, they were more successful in every other aspect.

Germany’s footballers dominate the most capped players and top scorer charts. They have also finished in the top two, top three, top four and top eight the most times (which are 8, 12, 13 and 17 times respectively).

So, while the defending champions were eliminated in the first round in the last two World Cups, it seems very unlikely with Germany this year.

FIFA World Cup is a tremendous and huge occasion, attracting billions of viewers today and having tens of thousands of goals worth of history behind it.