2014 FIFA World Cup/import

The 2014 FIFA World Cup will be the 20th World Cup, an international football tournament that is expected to take place between June and July 2014 in Brazil.

This will be the second time the country has hosted the competition, the first being the 1950 FIFA World Cup. Brazil will become the fifth country to have hosted the FIFA World Cup twice, after Mexico, Italy, France and Germany. It will be the first World Cup to have been held in South America since the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina and the first time consecutive World Cups have been staged in the Southern Hemisphere. Brazil will also become the first nation to break the well-established tradition of allowing a European nation to host the World Cup Finals every eight years.

Host selection
On 7 March 2003, FIFA announced that the tournament would be held in South America for the first time since 1978, in line with its then-active policy of rotating the right to host the World Cup among different confederations. The decision meant that it would be the first time that two consecutive World Cups will be staged outside Europe.

On 3 June 2003, the South American Football Confederation CONMEBOL initially announced that Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia wanted to host the finals. but, by March 2004, the CONMEBOL associations had unanimously voted to adopt Brazil as their sole candidate.

During the intervening months, Colombia decided that it would enter its own bid, and formally declared its candidacy in December 2006. A week earlier Brazil had also formally announced its interest. However, Colombia officially withdrew its bid in April 2007, leaving Brazil as the only host candidate. On 30 October 2007 FIFA officially confirmed that Brazil would host the event.

Qualification
The allocation of places for the final tournament was decided on 3 March 2011, with the distribution of the 31 places determined through the qualification process unchanged from that of the previous tournament. The qualification draw for the 2014 World Cup was held at the Marina da Glória in Rio de Janeiro on 30 July 2011. As the host nation, Brazil automatically qualified for the tournament.

203 of the 208 FIFA national teams at the time participated in the qualification stages, which began on 15 June 2011 and concluded on 20 November 2013. 24 of the 32 eventual qualifiers were present at the previous tournament, with the only debutant being Bosnia and Herzegovina, which qualified for the first time as an independent nation. The highest-ranked absentee according to FIFA World Rankings will be Ukraine, while the OFC region will have no representation at a World Cup Finals for the first time since 2002.

Qualified teams
The following 32 teams, shown with October 2013 rankings used for seeding in the draw, qualified for the final tournament.

Venues
Eighteen locations were presented as potential World Cup host cities: Belém, Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Campo Grande, Cuiabá, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Fortaleza, Goiânia, Maceió, Manaus, Natal, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio Branco, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and São Paulo.

FIFA proposes that no more than one city may use two stadiums, and the number of host cities is limited between eight and ten. The proposal of Ricardo Teixeira, the then-Head of the Brazilian Football Confederation, to use twelve host cities in "the interest of the whole country" was however accepted by FIFA in December 2008.

The twelve host cities were announced on 31 May 2009, with Belém, Campo Grande, Florianópolis, Goiânia and Rio Branco being rejected; Maceió had already withdrawn in January 2009. The twelve selections – each the capital of its state – cover all the main regions of Brazil and create more evenly distributed hosting than the 1950 finals in Brazil provided, when matches were concentrated in the south-east and south. As a result the tournament will require significant long-distance travel for teams.

A reported US$3.47 billion has been spent on stadium projects. Five of the chosen host cities have brand new venues built specifically for the World Cup, while the Estádio Nacional Mané Garrincha in the capital Brasilia was demolished and rebuilt, and the remaining six are being extensively renovated. The Estádio do Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, which already holds the record attendance for a FIFA World Cup Finals match (199,854), is the largest of the stadiums and will stage the final. The CBF originally intended to host the opening match at São Paulo's Estádio do Morumbi but it was dropped in 2010 and replaced by the Arena Corinthians after failing to provide financial guarantees for the required improvements.

The first new stadium, the Castelão, in Fortaleza, became operational in January 2013. According to Joe Leahy of the Financial Times, the works in the Castelão, "could set a precedent for other sporting public works", since the project "came in within budget and cheaper per seat" than the Maracanã stadium in Rio. Six of the venues were used during the 2013 Confederations Cup. Six further stadiums are however forecast to miss FIFA's original 31 December 2013 deadline for completed works. The completion of the new Arena Corinthians has been hindered by a fatal crane collapse in November 2013 that destroyed part of the stadium and killed two construction workers.

Final draw
The final draw for the 2014 World Cup will be held at Costa do Sauípe Resort, Mata de São João in Bahia on 6 December 2013, at 13:00 local time (UTC−3). In preparation for the final draw, the 32 qualified teams have been organized into four pots of eight teams with the seven highest-ranked teams joining host nation Brazil in the seeded pot. As with the previous tournaments, FIFA aims to create groups of geographic separation and therefore no teams from the same confederation may be drawn into the same group with the exception of UEFA members; a maximum of two UEFA teams per group is permitted. Due to the uneven number of teams included in the four geographic pots, additional draw procedures will be applied at the final draw to allocate the 32 teams into the eight groups.

Matches
The match schedule was announced at FIFA's headquarters in Zürich on 20 October 2011, with the kick-off times being confirmed on 27 September 2012.

''All times listed below are in Brasília official time (UTC−3). This is the time zone of ten of the twelve venues; the other two, Cuiabá and Manaus, are in the Amazon time zone (UTC−4), therefore for matches hosted at these two venues the local kickoff times are one hour earlier than the times listed below.''

Group stage
The group winners and runners-up advance to the round of 16. The ranking of each team in each group will be determined as follows: If two or more teams are equal on the basis of the above three criteria, their rankings will be determined as follows:
 * 1) points obtained in all group matches;
 * 2) goal difference in all group matches;
 * 3) number of goals scored in all group matches;
 * 1) points obtained in the group matches between the teams concerned;
 * 2) goal difference in the group matches between the teams concerned;
 * 3) number of goals scored in the group matches between the teams concerned;
 * 4) drawing of lots by the FIFA Organising Committee.

Group A

 * }

Group B

 * }

Group C

 * }

Group D

 * }

Group E

 * }

Group F

 * }

Group G

 * }

Group H

 * }

Knockout stage
In the knockout stages, if a match is level at the end of normal playing time, extra time shall be played (two periods of 15 minutes each) and followed, if necessary, by kicks from the penalty mark to determine the winner.