The biggest crowd ever at a football match packed the Maracana in 1950

On 16 July 1950, Rio de Janeiro’s brand-new Maracana Stadium hosted the deciding match of the World Cup between hosts Brazil and Uruguay. The official paid attendance was 173,850 - still the largest recorded crowd at any football match. The stadium had been built to hold roughly 200,000 standing spectators, and with thousands slipping in without tickets, estimates of the real crowd run to around 200,000 or more.

Brazil needed only a draw to be crowned champions, and for a while the coronation seemed certain. Early in the second half Friaca struck to put the hosts ahead, and the vast bowl roared. Then Uruguay turned it around: Juan Alberto Schiaffino equalized, and with eleven minutes left Alcides Ghiggia slipped a shot past the goalkeeper at the near post. Of that goal Ghiggia later offered a chilling boast - that only three people had ever silenced the Maracana, and he was one of them.

Uruguay won 2-1, and the silence was total. The defeat became a lasting national wound known as the Maracanazo - “the Maracana blow.” The Brazilian press reported fans collapsing in the stands and even suicides; the nation treated it as a collective catastrophe. The team’s white shirts were blamed as cursed and abandoned, and a contest produced the now-iconic yellow-and-green kit in their place.

No crowd has ever come close since, and none ever will.

The record is effectively unbreakable. All-seater conversions and the rigorous safety standards adopted after the 1989 Hillsborough disaster mean no modern stadium can legally pack in a fraction of that 1950 throng.