World championship

How the championship title is assigned

The title is usually awarded through a combination of specific contests or, less commonly, ranking systems (e.g. the ICC Men's Test Championship), or a combination of the two (e.g. World Triathlon Championships in triathlon). This determines a "world champion", who or which is commonly considered the best nation, team, individual (or other entity) in the world in a particular field, although the vagaries of sport ensure that the competitor recognised at the best in an event is not always the 'world champion'. This may also be known as a world cup competition, for example cycling (UCI World Championships and UCI World Cups). Often, the use of the term cup or championship in this sense is just a choice of words. Some sports have multiple champions because of multiple organizations, such as boxing, mixed martial arts and wrestling.

Certain competitive exercises do not have a world championship or a world cup as such, but may have one or several world champions. Professional boxing, for example, has several world champions at different weights, but each one of them is decided by a "title match", not a tournament. In a title match system, the championship can only be won by directly defeating the incumbent, who in turn must continue to compete to retain their title or risk forfeiture.

In association football (soccer), the first such tournament was the Football World Championship disputed from 1876 to 1904 between the winners of the FA Cup and Scottish Cup. After that, there have been many tournaments between teams from around the world, but it wasn't until 1960 when the Intercontinental Cup was established, competed between the winners of two continental championships: the UEFA Champions League from Europe and CONMEBOL Copa Libertadores from South America, the cup was endorsed by both UEFA and CONMEBOL but had no involvement from FIFA, the governing body for world football. As such, FIFA wanted to expand the tournament to include the champion from other continents—from the AFC Champions League (Asia and Australia), CAF Champions League (Africa), CONCACAF Champions League (North America and Caribbean) and OFC Champions League (Oceania)—and created the FIFA Club World Cup. The first edition in 2000 ran concurrently with the 2000 Intercontinental Cup, and in 2004 the Intercontinental Cup was merged with the CWC, which has been ongoing since 2005 with yearly editions.

Certain competitions do not have a world championship or world cup, but rather hold a series of events recognised as the elite level in their field (e.g. tennis and golf have a series of four Grand Slam events recognised as the pinnacle of the game, in addition to key team events, world tour finals and the Olympic Games, though each year ITF (International Tennis Federation) designates a World Champion based on performances throughout the year).