The World Championship for national squads (better known as World Cup) is considered, in many respects, the main football competition. Every four years, this tournament attracts the interest of millions of fans, and it can change the whole life of a country during some days. Brazil is the indisputable king of the competition, with an almost unbeatable mark of five titles.

NOTES

• Official FIFA scores and statistics extended and corrected with multilingual edition. All the names of players, referees, stadiums, and cities are written in their original spelling (or a standard transcription into Latin characters, in the case of other alphabets). This is the reason why some names may slightly differ in form with respect to other unstandardized information sources.

MAIN REFERENCE SOURCES

• FIFA World Cup Archive. I use it as the main statistical source for line-ups, scorers, scoring time and substitution time. Whenever there is a small discrepancy between it and other sources (especially for timings, let's say 1-2 minutes difference), I stick to FIFA; otherwise, I always use the most trustworthy of all the sources I check (especially Cris Freddi below).

• CRIS FREDDI, Complete Book of the World Cup 2006 (HarperSport, London, 2006). The "bible" of the World Cup, with the most reliable statistical information about the tournament (extensive source checking) and summaries for every single game of the final stage (from 1930 to 2002) based on the original footage.

• BRIAN GLANVILLE, The Story of the World Cup (Faber & Faber, London, 2005). A brilliantly written account of the World Cup editions, from 1930 to 2002.

• Different other online sources for local information on particular teams (mostly Brazil, Spain, Argentina, England, South Korea, Italy and USA).

• Special acknowledgment to Eduardo Mendoza for his corrections and historical research on the World Championship.