Soccer

Turning to the world's most famous representative of team sports, it is important to mention that Football which is apparently known as "Football" in most parts of the world and is called association football in Australia, which in turn is also known as soccer in North American for instance. As the motherland of this sport England was the first to form The Football League in 1888, that is the very first professional football tournament. There are several football competitions that took the sport on another, the highest level of popularity within the twentieth century. The most important one and which has probably the biggest proportion of influence on an international arena all over the world is World Cup. The FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup, or simply World Cup, a multinational football championship is held once every four years by the senior men's national teams of the FIFA members since 1930 when it was presented to the world for the first time.

FIFA is the global governing representative of the sport. As was mentioned before the event took place every 4 years in different parts of the world, the host, in this case, is elected by FIFA and is announced within several years before the event, the last announcements of Russia and Qatar as the hosts for 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively was already made in 2010 for instance. Exceptions of these traditions to organize the World Cup every 4 years were only the WW2 period, the years of 1942 and 1946. Moving to club football federations it is necessary to mention the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and The UEFA Champions League (UCL) which is the major and annual club competition held by the UEFA. UCL is arranged to reveal the best European club among the best ones from top divisions of the European league. Despite the fact that it is held in Europe UCL has the same effect among all clubs as World Cup among national teams and is deemed as the most important, prestigious, and influential club competition in the world. The governing body of association football, including futsal, and beach soccer in Australia is Football Federation of Australia FFA. The headquarter of the federation is located in Sydney. This type of sport started progressing in Australia much later in comparison with Europe, so the fact that the first Australian Association - FFA in its present form was only settled as the Australian Soccer Federation back in 1963, should not be surprising. Despite that in 2003 it was renamed back to the Australian Soccer Association, it took its current name back in 2005. FFA is also in charge of the women's, youth, Paralympic, national teams in Australian football, and all football-related sports like beach soccer and futsal. It also manages semi-professional and amateur association football in Australia. FFA was a founding member of the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) but had to quit the membership in that organization in favor of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and ASEAN Football Federation (AFF) on 1 January 2006.