World Cup | featured news

Ronaldo retired from soccer Monday because his body can no longer meet the demands of the game, ending a magnificent career in which he won two World Cups with Brazil and thrived with some of Europe's top teams....

Top 10 stories of 2010: WikiLeaks, Afghanistan war, EU financial crisis, Haiti earthquake, World Cup, North Korea.

Russia and Qatar will host soccer's biggest tournament, the FIFA World Cup, for the first time in 2018 and 2022 respectively. Russia headed off 1966 host England and joint presentations from Spain-Portugal and Holland-Belgium in Thursday's vote at FIFA headquarters in Switzerland.

The five countries jostling for the right to host the 2022 World Cup have made their final pitch to Fifa ahead of the Thursday's decisive vote in Zurich.

Three senior Fifa officials who will vote on the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids took bribes in the 1990s, the BBC's Panorama alleges.

The United States is no longer in the running to host soccer's 2018 World Cup after its bid committee decided to withdraw from contention and focus on hosting the 2022 tournament instead.

France coach Laurent Blanc will drop all 23 World Cup players for his first match next month as collective punishment for the team's embarrassing fiasco in South Africa.

At least 23 people have been killed in twin explosions in the Ugandan capital Kampala that targeted World Cup fans, police say.

Spain stunned the Netherlands to win their first World Cup on Sunday in sensational fashion with a goal in the last minutes of extra time.

Excitement built in Johannesburg on Sunday with Dutch and Spanish fans roaming the streets ahead of a mouth-watering climax of Africa's first World Cup between the tournament's two most impressive teams.