4

With Brazil and Uruguay, the only non European teams in the quarter finals of the 2018 World Cup out of the competitions on the first day of the quarter finals, all remaining teams are European. France and Belgium are already in the semi finals matches after beating Uruguay and Brazil respectively. On the second day of the quarter finals, Russia plays Croatia, and England plays Sweden. This guarantees the last 4 teams standing to be from Europe.

Has all semi finalist of a world cup all been from Europe before? Or more generally have all semi finalist qualified from the same continent? Since all other continents get maximum of 5 seeds (and that would have be even less years ago) I'm assuming this could have only happened for European teams before.

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  • You are right with your final assumption: Europe was always among the semi-finalists. Furthermore, there was at least one European finalist except in 1930 and 1950, AFAIK – Arsak Jul 7 '18 at 11:32
10

This will be the fifth (5) time that we will have all European semi final in a world cup. Other 4 times are as follows:

  1. 1934 FIFA World Cup1: Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany

  2. 1966 FIFA World Cup2: West Germany, Soviet Union, England, Portugal

  3. 1982 FIFA World Cup3: Poland, Italy, West Germany, France

  4. 2006 FIFA World Cup4: Germany, Italy, Portugal, France

Note: Haven't manually checked data for all world cup. Answering on the basis of this line in 2006 FIFA World Cup Wikipedia article:

With Argentina and Brazil eliminated in the quarter-finals, an all-European semi-final line up was completed for only the fourth time (after the 1934, 1966 and 1982 tournaments).

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  • 2
    Fun fact: 1934 was All-European from quarter finals. It was a straight knockout competition of 16 teams (started directly as Round of 16) and all 4 non-european teams lost their first game. – Fair Player Jul 7 '18 at 9:51

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