[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

I may have posted something like this on New606 four years ago, but I'll have a bash at setting it down again.

When I look back at World Cups, I tend to think of them mainly in two different eras. First came the Golden Age, which was everything up to and including Italia 90. In the Golden Age there was no internet and no satellite telly: BBC and ITV were the country's two major sources of entertainment for the masses, and for a solitary month they dedicated themselves to football in a way that was never repeated outside of major tournaments. There was no saturation point, no sense of being full to satiety with football, because it was such a rare treat. In the Golden Age there was a sense of mystique surrounding World Cups: foreign players in domestic leagues were still rarities, and as a general rule, if you went through the squads of every major nation at the tournament you'd find most of them played for clubs in their own country. Other European sides were partly a known quantity thanks to the qualifiers and the Euros, but when they drafted in someone from their second division as Italy did with Toto Schillaci in 1990, the only people who could tell you about him would be dedicated sports journos with their finger on the pulse (and even they were winging it half the time). For teams outside of Europe, the sticker books were all full of unfamiliar faces, and at best you might hear a whisper at school or at work about a player to watch out for. There was something magical about not being able to Google these mystery men from other continents and see YouTube clips of their every move; there was something magical about the fact that even the managers, coaches and players going up against them knew nothing about them, which often let them run riot to maximum effect; above all, there was something special about knowing that they'd be there on your telly for four long midsummer weeks - a fleeting butterfly fluttering to life on your screen - and then would disappear for four long, empty years thereafter.

If the Golden Age ended at Italia 90, then in theory the new one should have begun four years later, but to be honest I regard USA 94 as a bit of a halfway house, neither here nor there in World Cup history. It was a bang-average tournament sandwiched between two which gave us belting drama, and though satellite telly had crept in and Channel Four had started broadcasting Italian football, the culture hadn't completely changed yet.

The Global Age began at France 98, full of foreign players we now knew from the Premier League and others who were suddenly a lot easier to research. The mystique had begun to die, and the advent of mass internet by 2002 killed it completely; but to balance that out, online forums such as this one, coupled with social media (certainly in 2010 and 2014) have democratised the entire experience of watching the World Cup to the extent that you can see and hear what fans in every corner of the globe think and feel about the tournament at the click of a button. I had a great chat online four years ago with a Costa Rica fan, just after England's exit, and as much as I miss the simplicity of World Cups of my youth, we've still gained something good in the Global Age which would have been impossible twenty-five years ago.

Favourite tournaments? Italia 90 was shite football but amazing drama, and added new layers to football culture (Pavarotti, Nessun Dorma) which did us all good IMHO. France 98 maybe didn't have the same cultural impact, but there were some quality games and goals, and the sagas of Beckham and Ronaldo went down in history.