The notebook
Two things almost everyone gets wrong about the most photographed objects in football.
The World Cup trophy is hollow, and no winning team has ever kept it. The FA Cup raised at Wembley is not the old one from the museum — it is the fifth physical cup to carry that name, and it was made in 2014.
Here are the real numbers, and the two thefts.
The trophy in use today follows the 1911 design, which stands 61.5 cm (24.2 in) tall. The current cup weighs 6.3 kg, is handcrafted in sterling 925 silver, and took over 250 hours of work at Thomas Lyte, the firm that has made it since 2014.
The original from 1871 was much smaller: 18 inches (460 mm), which is why it got nicknamed the Little Tin Idol. It cost £20 to make.
The FA Cup is not one object with a long life. It is five:
So when someone asks for a FA Cup trophy replica, the honest answer is that the famous one already is a replica. The competition simply wore the originals out.
On 11 September 1895, the original FA Cup was on display in the window of William Shillcock’s shoe shop in Birmingham. Aston Villa had won it and it was being shown off locally.
It was stolen that night and has never been seen since.
Sixty-three years later, in 1958, an 80-year-old man named Henry James Burge confessed to the theft, saying the cup had been melted down to make counterfeit coins. It is a tidy ending and it is repeated everywhere — but it is worth knowing that detectives found inconsistencies in his account and the case was closed without confirming it. Whether that confession was true is genuinely unresolved.
The 1895 replacement had a happier life. Lord Kinnaird’s family auctioned it at Christie’s on 19 May 2005 for £420,000. It sold again in September 2020 for £760,000 — bought by Sheikh Mansour, who lent it back to the National Football Museum. A trophy that spent fifteen years appreciating faster than most property.
The first World Cup trophy was made by the French sculptor Abel Lafleur and renamed the Jules Rimet in 1946.
On 20 March 1966 — four months before England hosted the World Cup — it was stolen from a public exhibition at Westminster Central Hall. The country lost the trophy it was about to compete for.
It was found seven days later, wrapped in newspaper under a garden hedge in Beulah Hill, south London, by a black and white collie called Pickles, out on a walk with his owner. England then won the tournament, which is the sort of thing that would be rejected as too much if you wrote it as fiction.
Brazil won their third title in 1970 and kept the trophy permanently, exactly as Jules Rimet had stipulated back in 1930.
And then, on 19 December 1983, it was stolen again — in Brazil this time — and never recovered. The usual ending is that it was melted into gold bars. ⚠️ That is what is believed, not what is known: some argue it did not contain enough gold to make bars worth the trouble, and that it may have gone onto the black market and could still exist somewhere. Nobody has proved either version.
After Brazil kept the Rimet, FIFA commissioned a new one from the Italian sculptor Silvio Gazzaniga, first awarded in 1974. The specification:
That last point is not a scandal, it is physics. A solid gold trophy of that size would weigh 70–80 kg. No captain would lift it, and no team would pass it down a line of players. It has to be hollow to be a trophy at all.
The honest answer comes in two numbers that are very far apart.
The metal value is straightforward arithmetic: 5 kg of 18-karat gold, which moves with the gold price and lands in the low hundreds of thousands. That figure is real and it is also meaningless, because the object is not for sale and never will be.
The actual value is unmeasurable in the same way the Mona Lisa’s is. There is exactly one, FIFA will never sell it, and every valuation you read online is someone multiplying a gold price and calling it journalism.
A useful comparison: the 1895 FA Cup replica — not an original, not gold, no longer in use — sold for £760,000. Sporting history is worth far more than the metal it is made of.
This is the part that surprises people most. Since 1974 the original stays with FIFA — it lives at the FIFA World Football Museum in Zürich — and the winning nation receives a replica, gold-plated rather than solid gold.
Every photograph you have seen of a captain lifting it on the pitch is of the genuine trophy, handed over for the ceremony. What goes back on the plane is the copy.
And that is the rule rather than the exception across the sport: the Premier League, the Champions League and most domestic cups all hand over replicas or take the real one back. The trophies are too valuable, too fragile, and — as 1895 and 1983 both proved — too easy to lose.
There is one place where the cup is genuinely yours: the tabletop. Every tabletop football league in the world has ended with somebody handing over a small metal cup that cost very little and meant a great deal — which is the same emotional trick the real ones perform, at 1 % of the scale.
It is also why subbuteo accessories have included replica trophies for decades, and why the collectors’ market for them is real.
If you want the cup-run feeling without waiting for a season to end:
Play Toy Soccer Cup — free, in your browser
There are 57 leagues and 57 cups in it, and the trophy at the end is as hollow as the real one — just considerably easier to get hold of. Against the computer, two players on one device, or someone in another country.
And if you would rather read on: every World Cup match ball and why they changed, or the Chinese game that beat everyone to tabletop football by two thousand years.
Every measurement, date and price above comes from these two:
Found an error? Tell me — I correct it and say what changed.
