Champion was used very early in English. In the 1200s and 1300s it described an excellent fighter but it was only in the 1700s that it began to be used in relation to winners of a competition.
World championships were difficult to organise without air flight! Original references in the 1800s relate to boxing and billiard. Depending on how the counting goes the Olympic Games in 1896, there were 14 nations, but only 4 countries had more than 3 athletes. The first FIFA World Cup invited any country who wanted to participate to the first competition in Uruguay in 1930 and still managed to find only 13 participants. France was one of the 4 European teams (the others were Belgium, Romania and Yugoslavia) and they had a 15-day ship voyage just to get there. However, the organisers were FIFA – a Swiss-based organisation headquartered in a French-speaking part of Switzerland. This meant that the original competition was called the Coupe du Monde and the first time the phrase was actually used later was in 1934.
Things are different for the World Champions today. Germany won the FIFA World Cup on Sunday and on Tuesday the excellent football fighters flew into Berlin in an aircraft with special livery to present themselves to their excited German fans.
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