The planet clocks off

The World Cup came back on Thursday, and by the weekend every other channel had quietly surrendered. For the next month the schedules bend around the football: 48 teams, 104 matches, 39 days, played across the United States, Canada and Mexico, and no broadcaster is pretending it can compete. This is the one event that still makes a whole country look at the same thing at the same time.

England begin on Wednesday. Their opening match is against Croatia — 9pm UK time, at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas — and the fixture carries a scar. Croatia are the side that knocked England out of the 2018 World Cup in the semi-final, the closest the country had come to a final since 1966. Thomas Tuchel's team arrive among the favourites, with Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham and Bukayo Saka, before facing Ghana on the 23rd and Panama on the 27th. England have not won this tournament in sixty years. They set out, as they always do, convinced this time is different.

Here is the catch that will shape your June. Because the hosts are in North America, the football happens on British night. England's games are merciful — kicking off around 9 and 10pm — but a great deal of the tournament unfolds between midnight and five in the morning. This is a World Cup you watch in the dark, sound low so you don't wake the house, half the country turning up bleary on Thursday having stayed up for a group game between two nations they couldn't have placed on a map a week ago.

And they will stay up, which is the part worth sitting with. There is no rational case for any of it. Nothing is produced; nothing is solved. Grown adults will lose sleep, and friendships will briefly wobble, over whether a man they have never met can put a ball in a net in a country they will never visit. Sport is the purest thing we do with the passion we are not allowed to spend at work — identity that comes from who you support rather than what you earn, time given shape by something with no economic point whatsoever. A World Cup is that instinct at the scale of the planet: a few billion people agreeing, for a month, to care enormously about the same gloriously pointless thing at once.

Scotland are there too, already underway in their own group, which only multiplies the late nights in a good many British households.

So set a bedtime you fully intend to break. Wednesday, 9pm, England and Croatia, the held breath and the groan and the unreasonable hope. It will not matter in the slightest, and it will matter more than almost anything else on television this month. That contradiction is the whole point — and it is one of the better things we do with an evening.

For your diary: England v Croatia, Wednesday 17 June, 9pm BST; England v Ghana, Tuesday 23 June, 9pm; England v Panama, Saturday 27 June, 10pm.