The World Cup feels eternal. Every four years, we return to the same ritual: group stages, knockout rounds, extra time, penalty shootouts, yellow and red cards, substitutions, video review, brackets, and trophies lifted before billions of viewers. Everything seems so natural that it is easy to forget a surprising truth: almost none of it existed when the tournament was created.

In fact, the World Cup evolved as it progressed.

The rules of modern football predate the establishment of the World Cup itself. In 1863, England’s newly formed Football Association established the first official rules of the game. Football was so different then that, for example, a player could not receive the ball if he was ahead of it. In other words, forward passes were forbidden. The sport resembled rugby more than the game that now captivates the planet.

In 1886, the International Football Association Board (IFAB) was created, becoming the body that still governs the Laws of the Game today. When FIFA was founded in 1904, there was no World Cup. The most important international competition was the Olympic football, which was restricted to amateur players.

But there was an obvious problem: football was growing too quickly not to have its own world championship.

That is when Jules Rimet entered the picture.

On May 26, 1928, during a FIFA congress in Amsterdam, the French administrator succeeded in getting approval for an international tournament exclusively for national teams. The proposal passed by 25 votes to five. Officially, the World Cup was born.

The first edition took place just two years later, in 1930, in Uruguay. And it looked very little like the World Cup we know today.

There were no qualifiers. Teams were invited by FIFA. Only 13 accepted: Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, the United States, Mexico, Belgium, France, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

The list seems strange today. Where were Germany, Italy, Spain, and England? The answer is simple: they chose not to participate.

Traveling to Montevideo required weeks at sea, significant expense, and the interruption of domestic leagues. Many European officials considered it absurd to cross the Atlantic to play in a tournament whose importance nobody yet understood. Jules Rimet had to conduct a personal diplomatic campaign to convince several European nations to attend.

The format itself was experimental. The 13 teams were divided into four groups, and only the group winners advanced to the semifinals. There were no round-of-16 matches, quarterfinals, or the complex knockout structures that define the modern tournament.

In fact, the World Cup format itself evolved gradually. In 1950, for example, FIFA conducted what now seems like an unthinkable experiment: there was no final. Instead, the champion was determined through a final round-robin group, a format that produced one of the greatest sporting traumas in Brazilian history, the Maracanazo.

Over time, FIFA discovered something fundamental: football functioned not only as a sport, but also as a narrative. First, audiences meet the characters. Then, they watch who survives. Finally, they witness the decisive confrontation. That is how the combination of group stages followed by knockout rounds became the ideal formula for creating drama, identification, and spectacle.

The rules of the game themselves continued to evolve.

The offside rule, perhaps football’s most controversial law, underwent multiple transformations. Initially, forward passes were prohibited altogether. Later, an attacker needed four defenders between himself and the goal. Then three. Only in 1925 did the basis of the modern offside rule emerge, requiring just two defenders — typically the goalkeeper and one outfield player. The change dramatically increased scoring and transformed the way football was played.

There were no yellow or red cards, either.

For decades, referees warned and dismissed players verbally. The system worked reasonably well until international football began bringing together players and officials who did not even speak the same language. After a series of controversies at the 1966 World Cup, English referee Ken Aston came up with an idea inspired by traffic lights: yellow for caution, red for dismissal. The cards made their World Cup debut in Mexico in 1970.

Other changes continued shaping the tournament. Wins became worth three points in 1994 to encourage attacking play. Penalty shootouts replaced replays and random draws. The number of substitutions increased. And in 2018, technology entered the competition permanently with the introduction of VAR.

Not even the tournament’s greatest symbol escaped these transformations.

The original World Cup trophy was named after the man who created the competition: Jules Rimet. Designed by French sculptor Abel Lafleur, the trophy depicted Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. For decades, the rules stated that any nation winning the World Cup three times would keep the trophy permanently.

That is exactly what happened when Brazil won its third title in 1970, following triumphs in 1958, 1962, and 1970.

The trophy’s fate, however, became the stuff of legend. After remaining in the custody of the Brazilian Football Confederation for years, the Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen in Rio de Janeiro in 1983. The perpetrators, according to investigators, were Argentine criminals living in Brazil. The trophy was never recovered and is widely believed to have been melted down.

The current World Cup trophy exists, therefore, because the previous one disappeared.

Perhaps that is the greatest curiosity about the world’s biggest sporting event: the World Cup has never been a fixed tradition. For nearly a century, it has reinvented its own rules, formats, symbols, and even its trophies.

Ultimately, the World Cup does not merely tell the history of football.

It tells the story of how we chose to play, watch, and imagine the sport itself.