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The World Cup from Survival to Myth (1904-1958): Power, War, and the Making of a Myth
Paperback
ISBN13: 9782489048018
Publisher: World Stage Editions
Published: Apr 6 2026
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.13
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Before the World Cup became football's great global stage, it had to survive its own beginnings.
In this first volume, Badreddine Akkar reconstructs the long emergence of the tournament from FIFA's foundation in 1904 to the threshold reached in 1958. Far from a simple sequence of results, this is the story of how the World Cup was imagined, financed, regulated, staged, contested, and gradually made durable across decades marked by rivalry, propaganda, war, reconstruction, and shifting balances of power.
From Uruguay in 1930 to Fascist Italy in 1934, from the fractures of 1938 to disappearance in wartime, from the traumatic return of 1950 to the tactical turning point of 1954 and Brazil's answer in 1958, the book follows the competition as both sporting event and historical construction. Institutions, diplomatic pressures, gate receipts, infrastructure, media, memory, and changing forms of play all enter the frame.
Written with historical rigour and narrative control, this volume shows that the World Cup was not born as an inevitability. It became durable before it became fully universal.
A major history of the tournament's formative half-century.
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