A world awaits as a nation that nurtured and developed the fine art of our game attempts to stage a tournament to remember, where personal battles and public controversies will be played out for all to see.
A hundred years after Brazil’s national team played their first match, against Exeter City – yes, Exeter City – the World Cup lands in the home of artistic football for the first time since 1950 as Croatia confront the hosts in Sao Paulo. Feel free to say so on a postcard if you can think of a bigger happening in international football history.
Africa’s first World Cup, four years ago, maybe? This one feels more heavily freighted because there is a sense of the world’s favourite game heading home, preceded by riots, resentment, construction deaths, corruption scandals and strikes across Brazil, which we in the west tend to imagine as a nation of ball-jugglers forever in carnival mode.