Gooooaaaaalll! It is that four-yearly time again, when Mexican waves and Brazilian steel bands spill from the television into the living-room, and when talk in offices throughout Hong Kong - and indeed the world - will be of bad referees, whether Ronaldo was offside, and that Iran should definitely have been awarded that penalty.
There are several fact books in Hong Kong shops. One of the better ones is Brian Glanville's The Story of the World Cup (Faber, $135), which traces the drama of the competitions from the first in Uruguay in 1930 - when the South American country of two million people beat four European contenders to hold a competition conceived in France - to the 15th in the United States in 1994.
Football violence, or the threat of it, is regarded as a recent problem, but the 1930 final, between South American rivals Uruguay and Argentina, was hardly a calm affair, says Glanville. Argentinian fans were searched for guns; the referee, linesmen and players had to be given armed escorts and supporters were marshalled by police with fixed bayonets, though there was no report of hooliganism.
One hero of the match was Castro, a one-armed Uruguayan who replaced the unfit Pelegrin Anselmo as centre-forward. Allegedly threatened with death unless he threw the game, he nevertheless scored the final goal to ensure a 4-2 win for Uruguay.
Glanville, a soccer correspondent in Britain who has covered the past 10 World Cups - that is at least 36 years of writing about football - pulls no punches in his preface. 'It is to be hoped,' he says of the upcoming competition, 'that it will be more open, entertaining and adventurous than that in the United States. There, as one anticipated, the enthusiasm was enormous, the crowds immense, but much of the football was defensive and dull and the final was a protracted fiasco . . .' The Brazilian team that won was a 'parody of the great, creative Brazilian sides seen in so many previous World Cups', and won without glory against an exhausted Italian side forced to travel about 4,800 kilometres from east coast to west for the final.
This year's entry of 32 teams is too many, he says. 'The problem, overall, is that much too much football is being played at the top level, far too great a burden is being placed on players, and sooner of later the game must implode.' But before that there are plenty more books to be produced. Others about the World Cup include the newly-published - and expensive - Gary Lineker's Golden Boots: the World Cup's Greatest Strikers, 1930-1998 (Hodder, $305) in which the former England player gets to travel around the world, courtesy of BBC TV, to interview 21 top scorers from the finals of past World Cups. He has a co-author, Stan Hey, who perhaps really wrote the words.