James Delingpole has narrated this article for you to listen to.

I tried to think, Pointless-style, of two of the countries least likely to be participating in the world kicky-ball nonsense. Then I burst into the sitting room to annoy Boy. ‘Quick! Quick! We’re missing Haiti vs Burkina Faso.’ He looked up contemptuously from the sofa. ‘Actually, Haiti are playing right now. Against Morocco. So that’s another of your comedy fails.’

Sixty years in I don’t think I’m ever going to get a handle on this football malarkey. I first realised I was different in my first week at boarding school. All the other eight-year-olds owned a football and knew how to play with it and had even been taken by their dads to matches. I was the one who knew the Latin name for the common wall lizard.

The truth about Mexico’s record at the Azteca stadium

The tragedy of Cristiano Ronaldo

What should Paris do about Hamza?

For years, I used to think of it as a handicap, not knowing about ‘the thing that you have to be interested in if you hope to fit in’. Now I recognise it as a superpower, a kind of Cassandra-like gift to discern truths that most mortals deny: that football is not just boring and pointless but a sinister elite-control mechanism.

This might sound like a conspiracy theory but suppose you ran the world: how would you go........

© The Spectator