The 18-carat golden trophy is the driving force behind teams from all over the world playing their very best in this year's global football event. As players from Germany pose with, kiss with and hoisted one of the most coveted trophies in all of sports, Yahoo Sports said it was fair to assume that majority of them has no idea that they would not be able to bring the actual award home.
The World Cup trophy would be locked away and the glory of being the best football team in the world associated with the award will be represented by a gold-plated replica.
It would not be the first time that the trophy, which weights 13.61 pounds and is composed of 75% pure 18-carat gold, is replaced with a copy. The winners of the World Cup since 1974 has all walked away with replicas reportedly for security purposes.
Citing 2010 estimates by the world's top public gold buyer Cash4Gold, the trophy is said to have worth $10 million upwards and its value depends on gold price activity in the market. The trophy's value has already resulted to two incidents of theft, Yahoo Sports said.
Italian vice-president of FIFA Dr. Ottorino Barassi first hid the original Jules Rimet Cup during World War II in a shoebox under his bed in order to keep it out of Nazi hands. However, his security measures went out of the window when the trophy was stolen while on display in a London public exhibition in 1966. Although the trophy was recovered, the Jules Rimet Cup had been lost forever in Brazil's possession back in 1970, when the country won its third World Cup, the sports blog said. 13 years after, it was later stolen from the Brazilian Football Confederation headquarters in Rio de Janeiro and never recovered.
FIFA's trust issues with the golden trophy resorted to the organization having the names of the winners engraved on the current, original World Cup trophy. However, the sports blog said that after 2030, it was interesting to know whether FIFA would resort to creating another one since there are only three spaces left after this year's tournament winners gets their country's name engraved on it.
