My team, Holland, had just completed an improbable victory, and I was floating in a swimming pool in Brasília. Tropical birds chirped in the trees above, and friends chirped in the water around me. It was then that I had a eureka moment: of the seven straight World Cups I’ve been to since 1990, this is the best. And that’s an unbiased Olympian judgment. As Nigeria’s coach Stephen Keshi said straight after being knocked out: “So far it’s been wonderful.” The task now is to work out exactly why, so that we can bottle the Brazilian feeling and reuse it in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022.

The first element is attacking football. Most games at most World Cups are boring. Sitting through horrors like Japan-Paraguay in Pretoria in 2010, I’ve often thought, “Why is anyone watching this?” But with 10 matches left to play in Brazil, there had already been more goals than in the 2006 or 2010 World Cups. My theory is that since the early 1990s, live televising of matches has increasingly pushed football to create more entertaining content. Gradually, the game has become more attacking.

The second reason this World Cup works: Brazil. Partly it’s the hot sun, especially after the South African Highveld winter in 2010. Partly it’s the beaches. When you spend your first free afternoon in 20 days strolling along Copacabana, you realise that a first-rate beach should be a compulsory element of all future World Cups, like first-rate stadiums. This is the one thing the Germans didn’t provide in 2006.