FIFA World Cup Trophy

• 1. Introduction

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  The FIFA World Cup Trophy sits inside a museum in Zürich, Switzerland, and it leaves that building only on select occasions. A handful of people in the entire world are permitted to touch it with bare hands: players and managers who have won it, heads of state, FIFA officials. Everyone else must keep their distance. For the billions who watch the World Cup, the trophy is the ultimate object of desire. Yet its story involves theft, wartime hiding, a dog in South London, a gold-plated replica sold at auction for ten times its reserve price, and a cup that vanished so completely in 1983 that most experts believe it was melted into gold bars. Two very different trophies have represented the World Cup since 1930. What they looked like, who made them, and what happened to them tells you a great deal about the tournament itself.

• 2. Victory, Renamed

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  Abel Lafleur, a French sculptor, designed the original trophy. It was called Victory at first, and that name described its central figure: Nike, the ancient Greek goddess of victory, rendered in gold-plated sterling silver on a lapis lazuli base. In 1946 the trophy was renamed in honour of Jules Rimet, the FIFA president who in 1929 had pushed through the vote to create the competition itself. The trophy stood 35 centimetres high and weighed 3.8 kilograms. In 1954 the base was extended to accommodate the growing list of engraved winners. The Jules Rimet Trophy made its first journey to the World Cup aboard the Conte Verde, a ship that set sail from Villefranche-sur-Mer, just southeast of Nice, in June 1930. On that same vessel travelled Jules Rimet himself and the footballers representing France, Romania, and Belgium. Uruguay lifted the trophy first, as champions of the inaugural tournament. The tradition of the captain raising the cup high above his head began in 1958, when Brazilian captain Hilderaldo Bellini heard photographers calling for a better view and obliged them. Every winning captain since has repeated that gesture.

• 3. Wartime and Westminster

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  Italy held the trophy as the reigning 1938 champion when the Second World War broke out. An Italian official named Ottorino Barassi, who served as vice-president of FIFA and president of FIGC, took a decisive action: he secretly removed the trophy from a bank in Rome and hid it in a shoe-box under his bed, keeping it out of Nazi hands for the duration of the conflict. The trophy survived the war, but a different threat arrived in peacetime. On the 20th of March 1966, four months before England was due to host the tournament, the Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen during a public exhibition at Westminster Central Hall. Seven days later, a black and white collie dog named Pickles found it wrapped in newspaper, tucked at the bottom of a garden hedge in Beulah Hill, Upper Norwood, South London. The Football Association, chastened by the episode, secretly commissioned a replica for use at public exhibitions going forward. FIFA had explicitly not granted permission for a replica to exist, so when the original had to be returned to FIFA for the 1970 tournament, the replica was quietly hidden away. For years it was kept under the bed of the man who created it, a storage solution with a certain symmetry given how Barassi had managed the original decades earlier.

• 4. The Replica at Auction

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  In 1997 the FA's secret replica came out of hiding and went to auction. It sold for £254,500 - roughly ten times the reserve price of £20,000-30,000 - because speculation spread that the item on the block might actually be the original trophy, not the copy. FIFA bought it and then commissioned tests. The tests confirmed it was the replica. FIFA subsequently arranged for the replica to be loaned to the English National Football Museum, which was based in Preston at the time and has since moved to Manchester. Meanwhile the fate of the genuine Jules Rimet Trophy remained unresolved. Brazil had won the tournament for the third time in 1970, triggering a clause Jules Rimet himself had stipulated in 1930: a nation that won three times would keep the trophy in perpetuity. The cup went on display at the Brazilian Football Confederation headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, protected by a cabinet with a bullet-proof glass front. That precaution turned out to be insufficient. On the 19th of December 1983, the wooden rear of the cabinet was forced open with a crowbar. The trophy was taken. Four men were tried and convicted in absentia. The cup has never been recovered, and the prevailing belief is that it was melted down and sold as gold bars - though some argue there was not actually enough gold in the trophy to produce gold bars, suggesting it may have passed to the black market instead. Only one authenticated piece of the Jules Rimet Trophy survives: the original base, which FIFA had been keeping in a basement at their Zürich headquarters until at least 2015.

• 5. A New Trophy Born

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  FIFA commissioned a replacement ahead of the 1974 World Cup. Fifty-three submissions arrived from sculptors across seven countries. The commission went to an Italian artist named Silvio Gazzaniga. His design stands 36.5 centimetres tall and is made using 5.0 kilograms of 18 karat gold - that is 75 percent pure gold. The base, 13 centimetres in diameter, carries two layers of malachite, which add a further 1.175 kilograms. A chemist named Sir Martyn Poliakoff has noted that the trophy must be hollow: if it were solid gold at that size, it would weigh somewhere between 70 and 80 kilograms and could not be lifted. The original manufacturer confirmed this. Gazzaniga described his creation as lines that spring from the base and rise in spirals, culminating in two human figures holding up the Earth at the moment of victory. GDE Bertoni produced the trophy in Paderno Dugnano, Italy, at an estimated production cost of $242,700. After the 1994 World Cup, a plate was added to the bottom of the trophy's base where winning countries are engraved in their national language - "1974 Deutschland", "1994 Brasil" - with the names arranged into a spiral to leave room for future winners. As of 2022, twelve nations have been engraved there. The winning team no longer keeps the original trophy; instead they receive a gold-plated bronze replica. Three-time winners keep that replica rather than the original. Germany became the first nation to achieve three wins with the new trophy, in 2014. Argentina became the second in 2022, winning in Qatar.

• 6. The Trophy Today

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  Argentina, as the 2022 World Cup winners, are the current holders of the FIFA World Cup Trophy. The original object permanently resides at the FIFA World Football Museum in Zürich, departing only for the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour, which was first inaugurated for the 2006 World Cup. It appears at the Final draw for the next tournament, and it is present on the pitch at both the opening match and the Final. On the 3rd of December 2025, Lego announced that a version of the FIFA World Cup Trophy would be released in March 2026, timed ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.