FIFA World Cup 2014

FIFA World Cup 2014

The 2014 FIFA World Cup is an international football tournament which is currently being held in Brazil from 12 June to 13 July 2014. The 32 national teams involved in the tournament were required to register a squad of 23 players, including three goalkeepers. Only players in these squads were eligible to take part in the tournament.
A provisional list of 30 players per national team was submitted to FIFA by 13 May 2014. FIFA published the 30-player provisional lists on their website on 16 May 2014.
The final lists of 23 players per national team were submitted to FIFA by 2 June 2014. FIFA published the 23-player final lists, with the squad numbers, on their website, on 5 June 2014.
Teams are permitted to make late replacements in the event of serious injury, at any time up to 24 hours before their first game.
The age listed for each player is on 12 June 2014, the first day of the tournament. The number of caps listed for each player does not include any matches played after the start of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The club listed is the club for which the player last played a competitive match prior to the tournament. The nationality for each club reflects the national association (not the league) to which the club is affiliated.

The 2014 FIFA World Cup is the 20th FIFA World Cup, a tournament for the men's football world championship, that is currently taking place in Brazil.
It began on 12 June, with a group stage, and is scheduled to conclude on 13 July with the final.[1] It is the second time that Brazil has hosted the competition, the first being in 1950. Brazil was elected unchallenged as host nation in 2007 after the international football federation, FIFA, decreed that the tournament would be staged in South America for the first time since 1978 in Argentina, and the fifth time overall.
The national teams of 31 countries advanced through qualification competitions that began in June 2011 to participate with the host nation Brazil in the final tournament. A total of 64 matches are being played in 12 cities across Brazil in either new or redeveloped stadiums. For the first time at a World Cup finals, match officials are using goal-line technology, as well as vanishing foam for free kicks.
With the host country, all world champion teams since the first World Cup in 1930—Argentina, England, France, Germany (who won three times as West Germany), Italy, Spain and Uruguay—have qualified for this competition. Spain are the title holders, having defeated the Netherlands 1–0 in the 2010 final to win its first World Cup. They were eliminated at the group stage. All previous four World Cup tournaments staged in South America were won by South American teams.

Final draw
Main article: 2014 FIFA World Cup seeding
The 32 participating teams were to be drawn into the eight groups of the group stage. In preparation for this, the teams were organised into four pots with the seven highest-ranked teams joining host nation Brazil in the seeded pot.As with the previous tournaments, FIFA aimed to create groups which maximised geographic separation and therefore the unseeded teams were arranged into pots based on geographic considerations. The draw took place on 6 December 2013 at the Costa do Sauipe resort in Bahia, during which the teams were drawn by various past World Cup-winning players.Under the draw procedure, one randomly drawn team was firstly relocated from Pot 4 to Pot 2 to create four equal pots of eight teams.

As with the 2010 tournament, each team's squad consists of 23 players (three of whom must be goalkeepers). Each participating national association had to confirm their final 23-player squad no later than 10 days before the start of the tournament. Teams were permitted to make late replacements in the event of serious injury, at any time up to 24 hours before their first game. During a match, all remaining squad members not named in the starting team are available to be one of the three permitted substitutions (provided the player is not serving a suspension).

In March 2013, FIFA published a list of 52 prospective referees, each paired with two assistant referees, from all six football confederations for the tournament. On 14 January 2014, the FIFA Referees Committee appointed 25 referee trios and eight support duos representing 43 different countries for the tournament.