The FIFA World Cup Trophy, one of the most recognizable prizes in sports, is kept under lock and key at FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, with fans only catching occasional glimpses of it before and during each tournament.

That is partly due to its value, estimated at more than $20 million, but also because of the eventful life led by its predecessor.

The Jules Rimet Trophy was awarded to FIFA World Cup winners from the inaugural tournament in 1930 until 1970, when Brazil was allowed to keep it permanently as a reward for becoming the first nation to win the competition three times.

Named after former FIFA president Jules Rimet, who first proposed the World Cup, the trophy survived a failed Nazi seizure, briefly fell victim to thieves nearly three decades later and finally disappeared without trace in the 1980s.

The World Cup trophy hidden from the Nazis

After Italy won the World Cup for the second time in 1938, just over a year before the outbreak of World War II, the Italian Football Federation opted to store the trophy in a bank vault in Rome.

However, during the war, the Nazis orchestrated industrial-scale theft of valuable property across Europe and set their sights on the Jules Rimet Trophy.

Unfortunately for them, Ottorino Barassi, FIFA’s Italian vice president, anticipated their interest and smuggled the trophy out of the bank and into his home, where he kept it in an old shoebox under his bed.

The SS, one of the major paramilitary organizations in Nazi Germany, got wind of Barassi’s actions and paid him a visit, ransacking his house in search of the coveted trophy. But there was one place they failed to look: under the bed.

World War II led to the cancellation of the 1942 and 1946 World Cups, meaning the trophy was not publicly awarded again until 1950. By then, it had been returned to FIFA.

Pickles the dog enters the story

Ahead of the 1966 World Cup in England, the trophy was stolen from a display cabinet in London before being found several days later in a garden hedge by Pickles, arguably the most famous dog in soccer history.

Even after Brazil claimed it permanently in 1970, the Jules Rimet Trophy was not safe. In 1983, it was stolen from the Brazilian Football Confederation headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, minus the original stone base, which FIFA later discovered by chance in its own basement in 2015.

What happened to the rest of the trophy, however, has never been established.

World soccer’s governing body is not taking any chances with the current trophy.

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