Ninety-six years ago today, 13 teams kicked off the first FIFA World Cup in Montevideo. No qualifying rounds, no substitutes, no TV cameras — just football, a handful of invited nations, and a two-week boat ride across the Atlantic that most European sides decided wasn't worth making.
That tournament, modest almost to the point of irrelevance by modern standards, somehow became the blueprint for the most-watched sporting event on the planet. As the 2026 edition enters its final week across the US, Canada and Mexico, the contrast between then and now is worth sitting with for a moment.
From 18 matches to a $871 million machine
The 1930 tournament produced 18 matches. Uruguay beat Argentina 4-2 in the final and became the first world champions in front of their own fans — a fitting result for a host nation celebrating its centenary as an independent country. FIFA chose Uruguay partly because their national team had just won back-to-back Olympic football titles in 1924 and 1928. It was the right call. The tournament worked.
What followed was slow at first. The Great Depression and then World War II interrupted the rhythm. But television changed the trajectory permanently. The 1966 final in England drew an estimated 400 million viewers. By Mexico 1970, color broadcasts and corporate sponsorships had turned FIFA into a commercial force. The 1994 US tournament pulled record crowds and effectively planted professional soccer in American soil — something the 2026 edition is now harvesting.
The prize money pool this year exceeds $871 million. Final viewership routinely clears 1 billion. The 48-team format — expanded from 32 for the first time — reflects both football's genuine global spread and FIFA's appetite for more matches, more markets, more revenue.
Corruption, controversy and geopolitics never left
FIFA grew from a small European administrative body founded in 1904 into a Zurich-based entity overseeing 200-plus member associations. That growth hasn't been clean. The 2015 corruption crisis — bribery in bidding processes, Sepp Blatter's resignation, multiple arrests — reminded everyone that football's governing body had spent decades playing a different game behind closed doors.
Qatar 2022 added another layer: credible reports of migrant worker deaths during stadium construction turned the tournament into a months-long ethical argument that FIFA largely tried to wait out.
2026 has its own political dimension. Iran qualified for their seventh World Cup while their country was technically at war with the US and Israel. Several members of the Iranian delegation were denied US visas, forcing the squad to base itself in Tijuana, Mexico, even while playing group-stage matches across the border. Iranian officials called the restrictions discriminatory. The whole situation underlined something the tournament's clean centenary narrative tends to skip: the World Cup has always been political, from Uruguay's selection in 1930 to right now.
Ninety-six years in, the competition is simultaneously the best and most compromised version of itself. That tension isn't going away. Neither is the tournament.
