The First FIFA World Cup, 1930

The First FIFA World Cup, 1930

Project presented by the Center of Photography of Montevideo

This year Russia is hosting the FIFA World Cup. To accompany the most important sporting event of the year, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow recalls how the first-ever World Cup championship was held in Uruguay.

The exhibit includes photographs, posters, invitations and football attributes from the collection of the Montevideo Municipal Centre of Photography, and the Museum of Football in Montevideo.

At the 1928 congress of the International Football Federation (FIFA) in Amsterdam it was decided to stage football championships every four years, beginning in 1930. Uruguay was selected as the most suitable venue for the championship, since they had won the most football trophies and were also celebrating the centennial of their first Constitution in 1930. Several European member-countries of FIFA who were undergoing a protracted economic crisis in the 1930s expressed displeasure at the choice of Montevideo as capital for the championship, since for them sending teams to another continent seemed very expensive and inconvenient. Nevertheless thirteen national teams accepted the challenge: nine representatives of the American continent (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and the USA) and four European teams (Belgium, France, Romania and Yugoslavia).

FIFA rules stipulated that the country organising the championship should cover the expenses of all the delegations and also build a stadium that met all the requirements of the world tournament.

Construction of the Estadio Centenario was assigned to the architect Juan Antonio Scasso, director of the city hall’s open spaces and parks department, and to José Domano, a student at the faculty of architecture. A site in the Parque José Batlle y Ordóñez was chosen for construction of the stadium. More than one thousand workers laboured round the clock for ten months to construct the stadium. The speed of construction work was greatly admired both inside and outside the country, as well as the modern design of the new stadium, which marked an important milestone for the modernisation of public space in Montevideo. Jules Rimet, FIFA president at the time, congratulated Uruguay on the creation of what was then the largest stadium in the world dedicated solely to football.

When the first World Cup match began in Montevideo on 13 July 1930 the stadium was not yet complete.

The game between France and Mexico was held on the Pocitos field, which then belonged to the Peñarol Club. On the same day teams from the USA and Belgium met on the football field of the Parque Central. The first eight matches of the World Cup were played on these pitches.

The championship lasted eighteen days and in that period eighteen games took place, attended by more than four hundred thousand spectators. The first game held at the new Centenario stadium was between the national teams of Uruguay and Peru. Newsreels record the disappointment felt by many thousands of spectators at the performance of the Uruguayan team, which won its first match at the World Cup but provided a rather lacklustre game.

At the time radio broadcasts of football matches were still an innovation to which the public was not yet accustomed. Hence the official Uruguayan radio broadcasting service took the initiative to distribute posters and leaflets with a plan of the Estadio Centenario divided into squares, this serving as a code to give the listeners a better idea of what happened on the pitch.

The final match between the national teams of Uruguay and Argentina was played on the evening of July 30th. Although the Argentinian team were uppermost at the end of the first half with a score of 2–1, the Uruguayans managed to equalize and then win the match and the championship with a final score of 4–2. Celebration of the victory continued for several days, and a national holiday was declared for the day after their triumph, 31 July 1930.

Now, 90 years after these events, the MAMM exhibition relives one of the most important moments in the history of sport, allowing us to see the history of football from a fresh perspective.