The World Cup feels distant as excitement takes even longer to build than the infrastructure

ITV went back in time for their Qatar World Cup trailer; small wonder when the present mood surrounding this tournament is the way it is now.

In many respects, the World Cup finals are an attempt on all our parts to travel back in time. As any fool knows, the best World Cup is that which is held closest to your 10th birthday, and it’s the sheer otherness of the tournament that tends to rope you in. The stadia, the teams and kits, even in an age in which the details of any professional player on the planet are available at the touch of a button, that vibe of 32 countries taking a leap into the unknown and one of them emerging several weeks later as the world champions remains an intoxicating promise.

Broadcasters seem to be aware of this. ITV recently broadcast their pre-World Cup trailer and it leant heavily on sun-drenched images from tournaments gone by. Faces of the past – Gerald Sinstadt, Brian Moore and Gary Newbon – fill its first five seconds. Over-saturated pictures and commentary coming down a telephone line, all the proustian rushes that anybody in their 40s or 50s could ever want.

‘Remember when you were nine years old and sat in front of the television like a coiled spring?’, it all implied. ‘Well, you could be feeling something like that again in a couple of weeks’ time.’

It was very light indeed on anything related to Qatar itself.

But the otherness of Qatar 2022 is very different to the otherness of previous tournaments. Even four years ago in Russia there was nothing like this, even though we may all reflect that perhaps had we known what direction global events would take in the four years since then things might have been somewhat different.

There were clues of this otherness all over the trailer. For all the tugging at our collective memories as fans of the game, there’s no mention of the host nation, no shots of Qataris with facepaint on, smiling for the cameras. Were it not for the fact that it’s finally mentioned at the very end of the trailer, the viewer with no interest in the game could be forgiven wondering where it’s even being held.

And this coyness is understandable on the part of broadcasters, because if there’s one thing that we can say for certain about what passes for a ‘build-up’ to this tournament, it’s that audiences aren’t completely focusing on the football to the exclusion of everything else to anything like the extent that Qatar and FIFA would like.

Those pesky human rights…