Qualifcations are now underway for the 2014 FIFA Football (soccer in the US) World Cup. Held every four years, the finals last for a month and involve 32 national teams - one of which will win the cup in the final match in Brazil. The World Cup is enormously popular, it's the most watched sporting event in the world. The last one held four years ago drew a total television audience of over 38.8 billion - a billion plus tuned in for the final match alone. In comparison, the Summer Olympics draws about 4 billion total viewers.
BBC World Cup
Usability: 
news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/mobile/foo... (xhtml-mp)
The BBC which always has excellent sports reporting offers a dedicated World Cup page with news, scores, fixures. and tables summarizing results and standings.
Eurosport Football
Usability: m.eurosport.com/football/mh.shtml (xhtml-mp)
Eurosport, the big cable sports provider, has a mobile site which is one of my favorite sports sites. Articles are original, well-writen and in depth, The football page has results, prognostications about the next day's big matches and a couple of dozen articles, each illustrated with a image.
Sky Sports Football
Usability: m.skysports.com/football (HTML5)
mobile.sky.com/menu_sports_home.... (wml)
Sky Sports, a British satellite TV provider has a World Cup page on their mobile site with news, schedules and player profiles. Sky has both a text only WAP1 site and a cHtml PDA site with the same text content enhanced with small images. Sky doesn't resize images based on browser capabilities but the images at 100px wide should not be a problem on even the smallest WAP2 screens. Navigation is another story, the PDA site has the full text of the lead story plus over a dozen links on the front page. The wml version of the site is much easier to navigate on mainstream phones but doesn't have the photos.
ESPN Soccernet
Usability: epl.sportev.com/world_cup/index.... (xhtml-mp)
ESPN the US cable sports network, will be covering every match of the World Cup live for the first time this year. ESPN has also given their World Cup mobile web pages a new look and a different logo than the rest of the site. The World Cup articles so far are very short , less than 100 words and each is illustrated with a photo. In contrast, most of ESPN Mobile's articles on tennis, basketball, motor sports, etc have no photos but are much longer and more detailed, typically between 600 and 1200 words. While I like the images which at 100px wide are viewable on virtually any WAP2 phone, I'm disappointed by the tiny articles - really just summaries that leave you wanting more.
Yahoo
Usability: m.yahoo.com/w/sports/sow/?.ts=13... (xhtml-mp)
2010 FIFA World Cup starts June 11th. Yahoo Sports Mobile has launched a World Cup sub site featuring schedules, standings, news and player profiles. Once the matches start the site will also include live scores. Source: Yahoo Mobile Blog
