The original World Cup trophy, the Jules Rimet, survived a world war tucked inside a shoebox under a bed in wartime Rome, was stolen twice on two different continents, found once by a dog named Pickles in a London hedge, and is now almost certainly gone forever, reduced to a handful of gold bars somewhere in Brazil.
As the 2026 World Cup gets underway across the United States, Canada, and Mexico this month, and the world’s eyes fall upon the gleaming current trophy being paraded between host cities, the object that started all of this, the one that Pelé lifted in Mexico in 1970 and Bobby Moore held aloft at Wembley in 1966, has not been seen in over four decades.
Nobody knows where it is. Nobody, realistically, ever will.
That is not a story football tells very often, because football prefers its mythology clean and its outcomes certain. But the Jules Rimet Trophy is the one thread in the beautiful game’s history that refuses to be tidied up.
And with the world’s biggest tournament back on North American soil for the first time since 1994, it feels like exactly the right moment to sit with that story properly.
The Object Itself
Before the drama, there is the object. French sculptor Abel Lafleur designed the original trophy for the inaugural World Cup in Uruguay in 1930.
He built it from gold-plated sterling silver, with a base of lapis lazuli, the deep blue stone that had been used in fine art since antiquity.
At the top stood Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, arms extended, lifting a vessel above her head. The whole thing had the aesthetic of something designed for a time when football still felt new and slightly miraculous, clean Art Deco lines with something almost spiritual about the figure at the summit.
The trophy was originally named Victory. It was later renamed in Jules Rimet’s honour in 1946, to mark the FIFA president’s 25th year in office. Rimet was the man who had pushed through the idea of a global football competition in 1928, and for all his bureaucratic manoeuvring to make it happen, the renaming was appropriate.
Without Rimet, there is no World Cup at all.
From 1930 onwards, the trophy travelled the world with the tournament.
Uruguay held it first.
Italy twice.
Germany in 1954.
There was a stipulation written into the competition’s founding rules that any nation to win the World Cup three times would keep the trophy permanently. At the time, that must have seemed like an almost hypothetical condition, a distant horizon rather than a real possibility.
Brazil would make it a reality in 1970.
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The Shoebox
Before that, though, the trophy had to survive a world war, which it did because of one man’s silent courage.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the trophy was in the custody of Italy, who had won the 1938 World Cup in France. Rumours circulated that the Nazi regime had placed the object on a list of European cultural treasures it intended to acquire.
Whether that list was formal or informal hardly mattered. The danger was real enough.
An Italian FIFA official named Ottorino Barassi made a decision. He removed the Jules Rimet Trophy from a bank vault in Rome and carried it home. He hid it in a shoebox beneath his bed, where it stayed for the entire duration of the war.
When Nazi soldiers broke into his apartment and searched his rooms, they did not find it. The shoebox held. The sport’s greatest prize survived six years of global catastrophe in a manner that nobody from FIFA could have planned for, because nobody from FIFA had.
When peace returned in 1945, Barassi handed the trophy back, and the World Cup resumed in 1950. It is the kind of detail that most football histories mention briefly before moving on.
It deserves more than that.
Barassi risked everything to protect an object that represented the collective ambition of an entire sport. Without him, the Jules Rimet might have disappeared into the Reich’s collections, never to emerge, and the whole story of the trophy’s eventual fate would look very different.
Pickles and the London Hedge
Sixteen years after Barassi’s wartime gamble, the trophy was stolen again. And this time, football’s most implausible character entered the story.
In March 1966, four months before England was due to host the World Cup, the Jules Rimet Trophy was put on public display at Westminster Central Hall in London. The exhibition was a Stampex event, a showcase for stamp collectors.
The trophy was there as a centrepiece, guarded, insured for around £30,000, and surrounded by rare stamps estimated at approximately £3 million. The thieves who broke in on the night of 20 March were apparently uninterested in the stamps.
They took only the trophy and disappeared.
The Football Association received a ransom note demanding £15,000. The man who sent it, later identified as Edward Betchley, was arrested at the arranged handover point near Battersea Park. He arrived without the trophy.
A meeting involving undercover officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad fell apart. Betchley went to prison. The trophy remained missing. And FIFA’s president, Stanley Rous, had to quietly inform the world that football’s greatest prize had vanished into the city.
Seven days later, a man named David Corbett was walking his black-and-white Collie dog, Pickles, through the south London neighbourhood of Norwood.
Pickles pulled toward a hedge. He sniffed. He found a parcel wrapped in newspaper. Inside was the Jules Rimet Trophy. Corbett received a reward of £6,000. Pickles became a national hero and was given his own television appearances, commercial endorsements, and a film role.
The dog who found the World Cup trophy was, for a brief period in 1966, more famous than most of England’s footballers.
The true identity of the thief who took the trophy and left it in that hedge has never been definitively established. A documentary later identified a man named Sidney Cugullere as the likely culprit, a petty criminal who apparently realised the trophy was simply too recognisable to ransom or sell. He died in 2005 without ever being publicly named or charged.
The Football Association, rattled by what had happened, silently commissioned a replica of the trophy from a British jeweller named George Bird.
They wanted an identical copy for future public exhibitions, so the real object would never need to leave FA custody again. This replica was made with such precision that it would later become a source of considerable confusion.
According to the National Football Museum, it is widely believed that England captain Bobby Moore was presented with the replica in the dressing room after England’s 4-2 win over West Germany in the final, with the original kept safely out of reach.
The actual trophy that Moore held aloft in the famous photographs may have been the copy, not the real thing.
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Brazil, 1970, and the Promise Fulfilled
Four years later, in Mexico City, Pelé played his last World Cup, and Brazil fulfilled the condition that Jules Rimet had set 40 years earlier.
Three World Cup victories. The trophy was theirs to keep.
Brazil’s captain, Hilderaldo Bellini, had started the tradition of lifting the trophy high above his head for photographers after the 1958 victory in Sweden.
By 1970, that moment, the outstretched arms, the golden figure above the crowd, had become the defining image of sporting triumph, the template for every celebration photograph that followed in every sport for decades.
When Pelé and his teammates lifted it in Azteca Stadium on 21 June 1970, they were the first and remain the only team to win the right to keep it permanently.
The Jules Rimet Trophy was taken to the Brazilian Football Confederation headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. It was placed in a glass cabinet. The front of that cabinet was bulletproof. The trophy had survived a war, a ransom plot, and a London hedge. It was finally home.
December 1983
The wooden back of the cabinet was not bulletproof.
On the night of 19 December 1983, thieves forced open the rear of the cabinet with a crowbar. The night watchman was overpowered. The Jules Rimet Trophy, along with two other pieces of silverware, disappeared into Rio de Janeiro.
This time, there was no Pickles, no ransom note, no recovery.
Brazilian authorities launched a nationwide investigation. Four men were eventually tried and convicted in absentia. The mastermind was identified as a banker and football agent named Sérgio Pereira Ayres, known as Sérgio Peralta.
He had recruited an ex-police officer and a decorator to carry out the theft. A safecracker who was approached and declined later told investigators that he had refused on patriotic grounds, and also because his brother had suffered a fatal heart attack from the joy of watching Brazil win the World Cup with that very trophy.
The prevailing belief among investigators was that Peralta arranged for the trophy to be melted down by an Argentine gold dealer named Juan Carlos Hernández. Hernández denied it.
An analysis of his foundry found traces of gold, but the quality did not match the specific composition of the trophy. The case remained inconclusive. No charges related to the melting were ever proven.
The counter-argument to the melting theory points to one simple material fact: the Jules Rimet Trophy did not contain enough raw gold to produce even a meaningful quantity of gold bars.
The trophy was largely gold-plated sterling silver, not solid gold. Melting it down for its metal value would have been, economically speaking, almost pointless. This has led some researchers and investigators over the years to suggest that the trophy may still exist somewhere, hidden in a private collection or sold on the black market to someone who understood exactly what they had.
That theory has never been confirmed. But it has also never been disproved.
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Replicas, Confusion, and a Costly Mistake
The disappearance of the original trophy in 1983 left behind a complicated web of copies, some official, some secretive, and one that FIFA paid a very large sum to accidentally buy back.
The Football Association’s 1966 replica, the one made by George Bird after the Pickles incident, spent years hidden from public view because FIFA had explicitly not permitted a copy to be made.
For some time, it was reportedly kept under its creator’s own bed, an eerie echo of Ottorino Barassi hiding the original during the war. Eventually, it emerged and was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in 1997. FIFA paid £254,500 for it, reportedly convinced, at least for a moment, that the price at auction suggested it might be the genuine article.
The reserve had been set at between £20,000 and £30,000. That it sold for ten times the reserve fuelled the speculation. Experts later confirmed it was the replica. FIFA had spent a significant sum acquiring a copy of an object that they themselves had once owned.
That replica now sits in the National Football Museum in Manchester, which is where you can still see the closest living approximation of what the Jules Rimet Trophy looked like.
In 2016, at an auction of Pelé’s personal memorabilia in London, a special replica that had been commissioned and presented to Pelé personally after Brazil’s 1970 triumph sold for £395,000. The buyer was Swiss watchmaker Hublot, who purchased it with full knowledge that the object was not the original. They paid half a million dollars for a known replica, which tells you something about the mystique that surrounds the original.
The one physical piece of Abel Lafleur’s actual Jules Rimet Trophy that has definitively been located is the original base, which was replaced with a taller version in 1954. That original base spent decades forgotten in a basement at FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich before being discovered in 2015.
It is the last surviving fragment of the most storied object in football history.
What the 2026 World Cup Carries Forward
When a captain lifts the current FIFA World Cup trophy at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey this July, they will be holding something designed to learn from everything that happened to its predecessor.
Italian sculptor Silvio Gazzaniga won the commission for the new trophy after FIFA received 53 submissions from sculptors in seven countries. He built two human figures reaching upward together, supporting the globe above them.
The trophy stands 36.8 centimetres tall, weighs 6.175 kilograms, and is made from 18-carat gold. At current gold prices, the raw metal value alone runs to around $550,000.
No team can keep it permanently.
That rule was changed specifically because of what happened to the Jules Rimet Trophy. After every final, the original travels back to the FIFA World Football Museum in Zurich. Winning teams receive a gold-plated bronze replica, the World Cup Winners’ Trophy, to display at their national federation headquarters. It is a rule built on the memory of one very expensive lesson.
The trophy tour that preceded this 2026 World Cup, with the current trophy paraded through host cities and fan events across all three nations, follows a protocol designed around security that would have seemed extraordinary in 1983.
The object never leaves FIFA’s chain of custody for long. Nothing like the Rio cabinet with the plywood back gets near it.
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The Mystery That Remains
Football is a sport that resolves things. 90 minutes end in a result. Tournament brackets narrow to a single winner. Every four years, someone lifts the trophy, and the story closes cleanly.
The Jules Rimet sits outside all of that.
It is the unresolved thread, the story without an ending, the question mark at the back of football’s collective memory.
The most likely answer is that it was melted down in Rio de Janeiro in the winter of 1983 by people who understood its value only in terms of the metal it contained. That is a bleak conclusion, but probably an honest one.
The less likely possibility, the one that investigators and collectors and football obsessives return to periodically, is that somewhere in the world a private collector is sitting with the most extraordinary piece of football memorabilia ever made, the actual object that Jules Rimet commissioned for the inaugural tournament in Montevideo in 1930, that survived wartime Europe in a shoebox, that Pelé held in Mexico City, hidden away from the world.
The beauty of that second theory is that it cannot be ruled out. The gold content argument is real. The trophy’s composition made melting it for profit a financially irrational act. People do financially irrational things, obviously, but the doubt persists.
As the 2026 World Cup is currently ongoing with 48 nations competing for the largest field the competition has ever seen, the tournament that Jules Rimet pushed into existence with a vote at a FIFA congress in Amsterdam in 1928 continues to grow in scale, complexity, and reach.
The prize money on offer this year dwarfs anything from any previous edition. The host stadiums hold tens of thousands more than the Estadio Centenario did in Montevideo 96 years ago. The coverage reaches every corner of the world.
The trophy that started all of this is almost certainly gone. What it stood for, the idea that a single golden object could represent the highest achievement in the world’s most widely played sport, turned out to be permanent after all.
