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2006 FIFA World Cup

Games

By MBPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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The 2006 FIFA World Cup was the 18th FIFA World Cup, the international football community's quadrennial world championship competition. It was held from 9 June to 9 July 2006 in Germany, which gained the right to host the festival in July 2000. Teams from 198 national football associations from all six populated continents participated in the qualification process, which began in September 2003. Thirty-one teams have qualified from this cycle along with host nation Germany for the final tournament. It was the second time Germany hosted the exhibition, the first as a single country and the tenth time it was held in Europe. Italy won the tournament and clinched its fourth World Cup title. We defeated France 5–3 in a penalty shoot-out in the final, having ended up in a 1–1 draw after extra time. Germany defeated Portugal 3–1 to come in sixth. Angola, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Trinidad and Tobago and Togo made their first appearances in the final. This was also the first appearance under the name of Serbia and Montenegro, although they had appeared as Yugoslavia in 1998 earlier. Montenegro voted in a referendum at the end of May 2006, just before the tournament, to become a independent country and to sever the then-existing loose confederacy between it and Serbia, with Serbia acknowledging the result of the referendum early in June. Owing to time constraints, FIFA saw Serbia and Montenegro play as one team in the World Cup tournament, marking the first instance of many independent nations that have competed as one team in a global football competition since UEFA Euro 1992. The 2006 World Cup ranks among the most watched events in television history, attracting an unprecedented 26.29 billion seen times obtained during the tournament. The final reached an audience of overwhelming 715.1 million people. In 2006 Germany had a plethora of football stadiums that had exceeded FIFA's total capacity of 40,000 seats for World Cup matches. The venue for the final match in 1974, the still-standing Munich Olympiastadion, was not chosen for the tournament, since the rules of FIFA require one town to use two stadiums. The LTU Arena in Düsseldorf, the Weserstadion in Bremen and the Borussia-Park at Mönchengladbach are not even included. Twelve stadia have been picked to host World Cup matches. Many of them were known by specific names during the match, since FIFA bans the sponsorship of the stadium unless the owners of the stadium are also registered FIFA owners. For example, the Allianz Arena in Munich was known as FIFA World Cup Stadium, Munich, and even letters from the Allianz corporation were missing or obscured prior to the match. Several of the stadiums have have a reduced capacity for the World Cup, as FIFA regulations forbid standing rooms; however, this was accommodated because certain stadiums have a UEFA score of five stars. The stadiums hosted six matches each in Berlin, Munich, Dortmund, and Stuttgart, while five matches each hosted the other eight stadia. Final tournament of the World Cup 2006 concluded on 9 June. The 32 teams were split into eight groups of four teams each, in which the teams took part in a round-robin tournament to determine the two of those four teams would progress to the 16-team knock-out stage that started June 24. A total of 64 games were played. Even though Germany struggled to win the Cup, Germany considers the tournament to be a big success overall. Germany has seen a dramatic increase in the national spirit of flag movements which have traditionally been frowned upon by German society since World War II, when the German team played. The eight seeded teams were invited to the 2006 tournament on 6 December 2005. In the draw the seeds used Pot A. Pot B included the unseeded qualifiers for Latin America, Asia and Oceania; Pot C contained eight of the remaining nine European countries, except for Serbia and Montenegro. Pot D contained unseeded teams from both the CONCACAF region and from Asia. Serbia and Montenegro were included in a different pot: this was done to ensure three European teams were not represented in the group. In the special pool Serbia and Montenegro were first drawn, then their division was drawn from the three seeded non-European nations, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

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About the Creator

MB

I am a bird aficionado and really enjoy spotting them them on hikes. I greatly appreciate the variety of birds cross North America and the world. They are amazing and intelligent creatures, each so unique and with a wonderful life.

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