What´s there to say about Football? This is the most popular sport in the whole world and, with only ten days left until the World Cup starts, emotions are beginning to show and millions of fans from all over the world remain expectant of what promises to be the beginning of the event of the year: The inaugural match between Russia, the Country hosting the Cup, and the underdog Saudi Arabia. A lot has happened in the past few months and we´ve seen pretty much everything: National teams that will participate for the first time such as Panama; players involved in controversial decisions like Radja Nainggolan from Belgium, Leroy Sane from Germany and Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Sweden, who were left out of their national teams; some Historic Teams dissappointed millions of fans and didn´t qualify for this big party, among them we have Chile, the Netherlands and Italy.

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This world cup, to be celebrated in Russia from June 14th to July 15th, will be the 21st edition of this tournament born in 1930 celebrated in Uruguay. A lot has changed since that first event gathering the best football players in the world, from the number of national teams participating to the media used to transmit the games to more and more people every 4 years.

Throughout the years, this competition has evolved hand by hand with the upcoming technology and this edition will be very special because it will be the first time that the VAR Tech - Virtual Assisted Referee - will be used to help human referees make in-game decisions. The VAR is a system that allows the referees to stop the game so a special booth can re-watch a goal, a doubtful play, a foul or any controversial decision taken by a referee. This highly criticized technology used in other sports such as the American Football, definitely brings value to the tournament but, on the other hand, a huge part of the fandom, players, journalists and people related to football don´t like the use of technology. We are yet to see how the World cup develops using this tech as a decision making helper.

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It´s worth mentioning that from the moment Russia got selected as host of this huge event, controversy started to boil around the FIFA decision. Why? Well, some people are stating that there are too many political issues regarding minoritie´s inclusion and some of the country´s laws are too strict - for a world cup celebration - for tourists visiting this beautiful and cold country.

These complains are understandale. The world cup is the event that summons the most people from every corner of the world, from every ethnic background you can imagine and all of them have cultural differences between each other, so it´s to be expected that the conditions are favorabel for the people visiting the country. For this particular reason, some people are saying that this world cup will be one of the most followed ones in the history of the event, not only because of the beautifulness of the sport, but because of the political implications that come with it.

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A football world cup is something that every country wants to host, not only because of the obvious economic benefits it brings to the country and its people in form of tourism, permanent and temporary jobs, currency exchange etc, but also because of the joy and amusement it brings to the people.

Four years ago, the world cup celebrated in Brazil in 2014 had 3.42 million tourists, just behind the one celebrated in the USA in 1994 with 3.59 million attendants. This time, the tourism forecast is expecting to have 3.7 million tourists, mainly fans from the US, China, México, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil - bear in mind that neither the US nor China qualified for this edition.

This year will prove to be historic for the football history and you won´t stop hearing about it everywhere, especially Steemit, since we are planning to have on our @blocktrades Worl Cup more than 2 thousand participants from all over the world. We´ll have plenty of subjects up for debate - on which we hope some of you join - and we will be providing game revies, pre-match opinions and of course, the all known @blocktrades world cup prediction tournament.

What are you waiting for? Start following @worldcup-russia

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