Here we go then. Russia 2018 is upon us: another impossibly exciting, complex, wild-looking Fifa World Cup. And in its shadow, here we are too.
Welcome to another mob-handed, obsessively planned, lovingly curated effort to bring you the Guardian and Observer’s World Cup coverage in every conceivable form, to your every conceivable screen.
Yes, before you start to glaze over, this is one of those articles about how and why these articles get written. It’s quite short. It might be interesting. So stop glancing over there at Sid Lowe’s latest treatise on the meaning of Lionel Messi. Ignore, just for a moment, the seductive allure of that Jonathan Wilson piece on 40-year-old Eastern European tactics lurking just out of your eyeline.
Instead let’s talk for a minute about the World Cup that the Guardian and Observer will be bringing you as a reader over the next 35 days of sleepless keyboard-hammering fever.
This is the best bit of covering sport. I’ve been going to tournaments for the Guardian since 2008, and looking back I’m still amazed at the sheer amount of hard work and the sheer volume of content produced around these occasions.
From minute-by-minute commentary sent directly to you from the vast pulsing brain of some insomniac footballing obsessive powered only by nicotine, chocolate and a haystack of empty energy drink cans. To on-the-scene reports and news from a band of reporters who write and travel and file and follow stories every day, returning to their families five weeks later hunched, unrecognisable figures unable to communicate on any subject beyond wifi quality, mixed zone ticket allocations and how to get to Salvador protea at 3am with a fair-to-decent chance of not being abducted.
At the end of which comes the daily web presence and the pristine design and set of the paper itself. All of this arrives with you updated to the second, cobbled together from the corners of some sock-stinking press room, polished by endlessly patient whip-smart subs and made to look lovely by some sleep-deprived awkward genius of a layout designer.
I’ve been hugely proud – and yes, before you say it, inexplicably lucky – to be involved in all this. I definitely take it for granted most of the time. But the fact is the Guardian needs both your attention and your support to keep publishing and reporting as it does at these tournaments.
It’s no secret our industry is looking to find ways of continuing to do all this. The old way of selling bits of paper doesn’t seem to work. Advertising is a capricious business. Asking our readers to become subscribers, or to contribute to pay for something they value is, in our opinion, the best way forward. So if you like this stuff and think it’s worth helping it to continue, then why not make a contribution to the Guardian. It only takes a minute and can be as little as £1 if you’re particularly tight or shameless.
Yes, sport can be seen as a glorious irrelevance, but it also says something about who we are. And hopefully our coverage makes you sound slightly less unintelligent than you are during a discussion of the reactive gegenpress in the local Wetherspoons. Perhaps it lights up your enjoyment via the frankly brilliant reporting of our football hacks, led of course (damn him) by annual award hoover Danny Taylor, and backed up by the likes of Dominic Fifield, Martha Kelner, Dave Hytner, Stuart James and, with the long range heavy artillery, the mind bogglingly good Marina Hyde.
Perhaps you even enjoy reading the World Cup Fiver, following the multi award winning* daily World Cup blog, and listening to Max, Barry and star guests speak their brains over four increasingly hysterical weeks of World Cup Football Daily. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Either way we will always be here on these occasions. But this is only possible because of your support; and because you think what we produce is worth having and – yes – giving something back for in return.
Enjoy the football. May your nation, whoever you follow, raise your hopes briefly before the inevitable crushing defeat. And if you think what we do is decent, please help us keep coming back here to give you more of the same by clicking on the link below.
* this may not be true