January 14 – The stone base of the original Jules Rimet World Cup trophy has been miraculously discovered in a basement storage unit at FIFA headquarters in Zurich.
The piece carries the names of the first four World Cup winners, Uruguay and Italy, and will soon have pride of place in FIFA’s World Football Museum that will open in March 2016.
“It’s like finding an Egyptian mummy,” the museum’s creative director David Ausseil Ausseil told The Associated Press. “You can’t put a price tag on it because it’s family jewels.”
The base is a 10-centimeter tall, octagonal piece of blue semi-precious lapis lazuli stone. The trophy was given a new base before the 1954 tournament.
“We think no FIFA president has seen it since Jules Rimet himself,” added Ausseil.
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