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SAMBA TIME . . . Brazilian fans will be out in full force to support their team, which gets the 2014 Fifa World Cup underway tonight with a tricky tie against Croatia in Sao Paulo, hoping that Neymar and his teammates can bury the ghost of 1950 by winning football’s biggest trophy in their backyard. — AFP

SAO PAULO — Tonight Brazil and Croatia will sing their anthems, shake each other’s hands, kick off the 20th World Cup and one month from now a sweaty man, wearing an armband and a weary smile, will lift the world’s most famous trophy into the Rio de Janeiro sky.
The World Cup is here.

Those of you who have been watching it for a while know what’s coming.

Those of you who are here for the first time, prepare to be consumed.

The last time the tournament was held in Brazil, in 1950, a mere 13 teams turned up — there was no interest from Africa or Oceania and only India represented Asia.

Coverage was sporadic and patchy, results were transmitted back to the competing nations by telegram and the report of the final in the Times of London had just 61 words.

This time, 32 teams have travelled, and it is a truly global tournament.

All the previous winners are here — Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Germany, Italy, France, England and the current holders Spain — along with one debutant, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Fifa claim that over a billion people watched, at least, part of the 2010 World Cup final game and that nearly half the planet tuned in to watch one match or the other during the tournament.

Even if we apply a certain amount of justified scepticism to the precise figures, they are indicative.

A fair chunk of the world is watching. A fair chunk of humanity cares.

Fifa gave the tournament to Brazil in the hope that the World Cup’s most successful nation, a country and a population that identifies itself through football in a way few others do, would deliver a sun-drenched month of clichéd and photogenic bliss, a month, in other words, of samba, carnival and joga bonito.

Instead, the tournament gets underway to scenes of protests in the streets and murmurings of knives in the boardrooms.

The Brazilian population have pressing questions about the priorities of their government, wondering just who, exactly, will benefit from all the money being spent and why, exactly, it doesn’t appear to be them.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, is digesting new revelations about the murky workings of Fifa, as the decision to award the 2022 tournament to Qatar continues its slow and dispiriting procession from “resoundingly stupid” to “thoroughly corrupt.”

But it’s still the World Cup.

It may not get the respect of the moon landing or penicillin, but this competition, in all its planet-uniting attention-grabbing time-consuming glory, is one of humanity’s finest and most durable achievements.

That durability may well be what lets Fifa get away with being fifa but it’s also what ensures that the World Cup has so far survived Fifa being Fifa.

A poor World Cup is better than almost any of the other months that life will give you. A good one — and some people will tell you that there hasn’t been one of those since 1986, even as they sit down to their third group game of the day — is a thing of wonder.

Will this be a good one? It has every chance. The two favourites are each chasing a different version of history. Brazil are looking to stretch their record five victories into a sixth, in the process reinforcing their claim to be this tournament’s greatest nation and laying to rest the ghost of 1950.

Holders Spain are looking to win a fourth consecutive major trophy and establish this generation of international players as perhaps the best of all-time.

Yet neither is without their weaknesses. Brazil have to cope with unprecedented pressure, and will attempt to avenge the trauma of 1950 with a squad that is largely untested in international football.

Spain have two main concerns.

Prosaically, there are question marks about the age of parts of their squad, and the depth of other parts. More intriguingly, their distinctive, possession-centred style of play has come under increased scrutiny.

The last time they played Brazil, in the 2013 Confederations Cup final, they didn’t just lose. They were taken to pieces.

But if the favourites stumble, there are plenty of teams ready to pounce.

Take Argentina, whose Lionel Messi-centred forward line is the stuff of dreams even as their defensive options are the stuff of sleepless nights.

Then there’s France, built around the magnificent Paul Pogba, and looking to be hitting form at exactly the right time.

Germany’s collection of attacking talent is starting to come under pressure to achieve something tangible.

Italy are always Italy.

Then there is England . . . no, probably not England.

What about the stable of dark horses — Belgium, Colombia, the Netherlands, Portugal, maybe even the likes of the USA, Croatia and Japan — who, while unlikely to be bothering the engravers come mid-July, certainly have the capacity to bloody one or two supposedly superior noses.

And as ever, there will be a couple of individuals, young or unheralded, who will introduce themselves to the world, just as there will be a couple of big names who will fail to live up to the adverts.

Reputations will be inflated and broken.

Somebody’s going to get their move to Real Madrid; somebody else is going to be turned into an effigy and burnt.

So yes, the ingredients are there for something spectacular. But even if things unfold predictably, or the football itself ends up being dominated by the negative, the destructive and the cynical, there is still much to look forward to.

World Cups don’t just resonate through the years for the eventual results.

They aren’t just about the grand sweep of football’s history. They’re about the moments, important or incidental, that stick in your brain for what can often seem like no good reason at all.

Funny moments, silly moments, shocking moments, controversial moments that never lose their appeal despite YouTube, despite clip shows, despite the endless degradations of nostalgia.

Rashidi Yekini shaking the nets, Roberto Baggio. Roger Milla and Nobby Stiles. Fabio Grosso and Marco Tardelli. Ronaldo and Romania’s follicular experimentation.

The Battles of Santiago and Nuremberg. Harald Schumacher’s improvised dentistry. Luis Suarez’s dream-slaughtering save, Zidane head-butting Materazzi to the floor.

Rattin being dragged from the pitch. Cameroon assaulting Caniggia. Rivaldo clutching his face. Byron Moreno. Jared Borgetti. Saeed Al-Owairan. Lillian Thuram, not once but twice.

In short, something will happen over the next few weeks that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

If you’re lucky, it might be the team you support winning the World Cup; if we’re all lucky, it might be a referee taking a ball in the face. It could be funny; it could be sad.

For those of you who are new to all this, it might just be the moment you fall in love with football. Don’t worry. It’s quite the most beautiful thing anybody could ever hope to fall in love with.

The World Cup is the best, the biggest and the brightest of them all. — SB Nation.