The much-touted World Cup games in Brazil begin today.

Increasingly these past years, the World Cup vies with the Olympic Games for being the most watched sports event the world over. While the Olympic Games begin with a march-past and what has become the most choreographed (and expensive) inauguration but then tend to get rather diffused, the World Cup builds to a climax as teams are eliminated and the best ones are left to fight it out at the final.

Both events are not just huge crowd attractions but also huge business generators.

First of all, no World Cup, no Olympic Games can be staged without the backing of huge international sponsors who, years before the event, negotiate the best deals that give them world-wide publicity. They also get most of the seats at the venues and pack them with people being sponsored by them or favourite clients.

While the run-up to Olympic Games in Malta tends to be rather muted because of low expectations of any high profile showing by the Maltese athletes, Malta being a football-mad country usually goes over the top at World Cup time.

If the experience of the last World Cup events is any model, Maltese tend to watch World Cup games with a passion, unsurpassed in most other countries, including the countries that the Maltese most support – Italy and England.

The World Cup taking place in early summer enables watching the games to become a collective passion. Four years ago, World Cup villages sprouted almost everywhere with riotous crowds following the games with passion.

This time, notwithstanding that some games (and especially The Game, England versus Italy on Sunday at 00.00am) are being played late, bars and some ad hoc venues are vying for competition. There will undoubtedly be complaints by neighbours kept awake by the din but mercifully the games will soon be over, to be supplanted by the all-pervading din of festas.

It is not bar-owners who rub their hands with glee when a World Cup approaches. From months in advance, the country has been inundated with adverts for increasingly big television screens with all mod cons, that are today taken as standard – digital, crystal-clear screens – urging one and all it is about time one competes with the Joneses and gets to buy those modern television sets all seem to have, the bigger the better to make the neighbours go green with envy when one invites them over to watch a game.

There is a rather significant change this time round – given the carpet coverage of the World Cup games by most television stations (TVM, for instance, is relaying all games in crisp digital form) we have been spared the jousting between stations and the networks that we still get, for instance with Italian and English football and with Champions League.

It is not just bartenders and television retailers who get bonuses when a World Cup approaches. For many past months a crowd of people, adults and elderly persons as well as boys and girls, created a daily crowd at Merchants Street corner with St John Street in Valletta to the puzzlement and later amazement of onlookers and tourists. They were the Panini crowd, collectors of the Panini mugshots of all players and exchanging those they have in surplus for the ones they lack to complete their albums, which would later be treasured among their most beloved possessions.

In recent years, football has grown into a mass attraction in Malta, attracting both men and women to watch the games, although this has not so far spread to attract people to watch the games of the Maltese leagues of football.

While the men debate the finer points of football tactics and abilities, women tend to discuss the torso, abs and faces of the principal players. Maybe this statement needs to be nuanced further: for men there are today sites where they can drool over the players WAGS (women and girlfriends) while one can find an increasing number of women who can discuss football tactics and strategies on a par with men.