Bulgaria at the FIFA World Cup
participation of Bulgaria's national football team in the FIFA World Cup
The FIFA World Cup is an international association football competition contested by the men's national teams of the members of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four years since the first tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946, due to World War II.
The tournament consists of two parts, the qualification phase and the final phase (officially called the World Cup Finals). The qualification phase, which currently take place over the three years preceding the Finals, is used to determine which teams qualify for the Finals. The current format of the Finals involves 48 teams competing for the title, at venues within the host nation (or nations) over a period of about a month. The World Cup final is the most widely viewed sporting event in the world, with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the 2006 tournament final.
Bulgaria has appeared in the FIFA World Cup on seven occasions, the first being at the 1962 tournament. They appeared in the FIFA World Cup subsequently in 1966, 1970, 1974, 1986, 1994 and 1998. Their best performance was in 1994, where they finished in fourth place. They have failed to qualify for a FIFA World Cup since 1998.
Record at the FIFA World Cup
Bulgaria's first appearance at the World Cup was at the seventh edition of the tournament in 1962.
“Bulgaria at the FIFA World Cup” enters the record as participation of Bulgaria's national football team in the FIFA World Cup. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bulgaria, FIFA and World can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Bulgaria at the FIFA World Cup” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Bulgaria, FIFA and World provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16828472. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1930, 1942, 1946 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bulgaria at the FIFA World Cup” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.