When the World Stopped

There was no World Cup in 1942. There was no World Cup in 1946. The Second World War — which formally began in September 1939 and would claim an estimated 70 to 85 million lives before it ended in 1945 — made organised international football impossible. Across occupied Europe, stadiums became military storage facilities, internment camps, and sites of execution. Players were conscripted, clubs were disbanded, and the infrastructure of the global game was dismantled.

FIFA had planned to hold the 1942 tournament in Germany and the 1946 edition in Brazil. Both were formally cancelled. The organisation itself barely survived the war years, with its Geneva headquarters maintaining only a skeletal operation. The gap between the 1938 World Cup in France and the next tournament, in Brazil in 1950, would stretch to twelve years — leaving Italy as world champions for a record span that no nation before or since has matched.

A Record Nobody Wanted

Because the 1938 World Cup was not followed by another for over a decade, Italy held the title of world champions from 1938 to 1950 — a period of twelve years, and the longest reign any nation has held the unofficial title of world's best. It was a record born entirely of tragedy. The Italian players who won in Paris in 1938 never had the chance to defend that title on a World Cup stage.

The Trophy in the Shoebox

Among the most remarkable stories of football during the war years is what happened to the Jules Rimet Trophy — the golden statuette that represented the highest honour in world football.

FIFA vice-president Ottorino Barassi, an Italian, understood that the trophy was at risk of being seized by Nazi authorities if Italy was occupied. Rather than allow it to fall into German hands, Barassi took the trophy from its official location and hid it inside a shoebox under his bed in Rome, where it remained throughout the occupation of Italy. He told no one — not FIFA, not the Italian federation. He simply hid it and waited.

When the war ended and football slowly resumed, Barassi retrieved the trophy intact and returned it to FIFA. The Jules Rimet Trophy survived the deadliest conflict in human history inside a cardboard shoebox. It was eventually stolen from an exhibition in England in 1966 — only to be found a week later in a South London garden by a dog named Pickles — but that is a story for another chapter.