The making of the World Cup

How a dispute about payment produced the most valuable event in sport

The competition now watched by a larger audience than any other sporting event began as an argument about amateurs. Football had been played at the Olympic Games since the beginning of the century, and the Olympic movement insisted that competitors be unpaid at a time when the best players in Europe and South America were being paid, openly or otherwise. An international federation founded in 1904 concluded that a tournament of its own was the only way to assemble the strongest teams, and resolved in 1928 to stage one.

The first was held in Uruguay in 1930, and the choice reveals how the sport's centre of gravity then lay. The hosts were Olympic champions and were celebrating a centenary of independence; they offered to pay the travelling costs of every visiting team and to build a new stadium. Even so, only four European sides entered, since the crossing took a fortnight by ship each way and clubs were unwilling to release players for two months. The tournament was won by the hosts, watched by a crowd that has never been reliably counted, and generally judged a success by everyone except the Europeans who had stayed at home.

The absence of the leading European nations from the first tournament had a consequence that outlasted it. A competition whose champion had beaten only a fraction of the world's good teams could be dismissed, and it was, by the countries that had not gone; the argument that the trophy meant nothing until everyone competed for it was made loudly for a decade and quietly for two more. Growth was interrupted almost immediately. Two tournaments were held in the 1930s, both in circumstances shaped by the politics of the decade, and then none at all for twelve years while the war and its aftermath intervened. When the competition resumed in 1950 it did so in Brazil, in a stadium built to hold a crowd larger than any before or since, and produced the result that is still the reference point for national sporting disappointment: a home defeat in the final match before something close to two hundred thousand spectators. The scale of that occasion is worth pausing on, because it marks the last point at which the size of a stadium determined the size of an audience. Everything that has happened to the competition since has depended on people who were not there.

Television changed the tournament more thoroughly than any decision taken by its administrators. The 1954 competition was the first to be broadcast, to a handful of countries and a small number of sets; by 1970 the pictures were in colour and reached most of the world by satellite; and the consequence was that the revenue of the competition ceased to depend on how many people could be admitted to a stadium. Once that link was broken, the value of the tournament was determined by the size of the audience watching at home, which in turn made the scheduling of matches a matter of negotiation with broadcasters in distant time zones rather than of local convenience.

Expansion followed the money. Sixteen teams had competed for decades, almost all of them European or South American; the field was enlarged to twenty-four in 1982, to thirty-two in 1998, and will reach forty-eight in 2026. Each enlargement was justified by the argument that the competition should represent the whole of the sport rather than the two continents that had historically dominated it, and each was criticised on the grounds that additional places dilute the quality of the football. Both claims are defensible, and the second is harder to sustain than it was, since the gap between the traditional powers and the rest has narrowed considerably over the same period. It is also worth noticing which argument tends to be made by whom: the federations whose entry is secure raise the question of quality, and the federations for whom qualification is the whole ambition raise the question of representation, and each is stating an interest as though it were a principle.

The award of the tournament to particular countries has become the most contentious part of the enterprise. A host is required to provide stadiums, transport and accommodation on a scale that few cities need afterwards, and the economic case advanced beforehand — visitors, investment, an enduring reputation — has been examined repeatedly by economists and found, on the whole, to be weak. The visitors largely displace the tourists who would otherwise have come; the construction employs people who would in most cases have been employed on something else; and the reputation, whatever it is worth, is not obviously proportional to the expenditure. Stadiums built for a month of football have been demolished, converted or left to deteriorate in several countries. What survives the arithmetic is a political calculation of a different kind: hosting confers attention, and attention is worth paying for, whether or not it is worth what the accounts record.

The competition's history is therefore not a story of steady improvement in a sporting contest. It is the story of an event that was created to escape a rule about amateurism, that was ignored by half of Europe at its first attempt, and that became, through television rather than through football, the most valuable property in sport. The matches remain the reason anyone watches. They are no longer the reason the tournament exists in the form it does.