World Cup fills the gap despite football divas

THREE days to go before it all kicks off. Then a month of relentless football action on the telly, down the pub, on the big screens, in the news, everywhere.

We will squash on sofas, crowd into overheated venues standing up, watch it on our iPads, read about it, talk about it, bet on it, bunk off work for it, stay up late for it. We will go to great lengths to watch a bunch of millionaires kicking a ball around a series of large rectangular bits of grass in the southern hemisphere.

And not the most exemplary of millionaires either. When they are not biting each other (Suarez) or being dodgy around tax (Messi), they are writing autobiographies — admittedly not all by themselves — moaning about being insulted at pay offers of 55 grand a week (Ashley Cole). They have been known to set fireworks off in the bathroom (Balotelli), shoot students with air rifles (Cole again), assault taxi drivers (Jack Wilshire), assault random people in night clubs (most of them) and serially cheat on their partners (all of them with the possible exception of Gareth Bale — yet). As role models go, they are somewhere between an incontinent dog on your white wool rug and Attila the Hun.

Meanwhile, far far away in Brazil, ordinary people are furious at all the money being spent on football stadiums instead of schools and hospitals. We’ve seen the footage of indigenous people in tribal dress shooting arrows at riot police. There have also been vocal campaigns from footballers to travelling fans urging them not to become sex tourists preying on the poor (advice which would be funny if it weren’t so awful — the idea of footballers telling anyone not to have sex is comical).

Football is more corrupt that a central African dictatorship — how else did Qatar get the 2022 World Cup? It’s not like the mini-state have ever produced even a football, never mind a footballer. Instead they bought the World Cup with their oil billions, to make Qatar even richer. And so far, have gotten away with it — as has the boss of the UK Premiership who referred to women as ‘gash’. The first and last gay footballer to come out ended up hanging himself. Then there’s all those bananas that get chucked on the pitch.

And yet we love it. Such is the magic of football. Our eyeballs will be glued to the World Cup — no team too small, no match too obscure. Now that the season is over, Sky Sports unplugged, season tickets put away in the sock drawer for the summer, there is a huge football-sized gap in our lives — a sort of existential vacuum where you don’t know quite what to do with yourself on Saturday afternoons and have stopped reading the sports pages. Along comes the World Cup, to fill that football void. Counting. The. Days.