England play for third place tonight. Nobody wanted this game.

There is one fixture in football that the players are more or less taught to resent, and it is the one England will play tonight. The third-place play-off. The game FIFA has taken to calling the bronze final, a shinier name for the oldest consolation in sport: two teams beaten in the semis, sent out the day before the final they both wanted, to decide which of them finishes third and which finishes fourth. Almost nobody, in the cold light of it, wants to be there.

England are there because Argentina beat them on Wednesday, two goals to one in Atlanta, Anthony Gordon's early lead undone late. France are there because Spain beat them, two to nothing. So the two of them meet in Miami tonight, both nursing the same fresh bruise, to play out a result that changes nothing anyone will remember in a year.

And a few million people in this country will stop what they are doing and watch it.

That is the thing worth sitting with. This is the purest version of the question this paper keeps asking. Here is a contest that produces nothing, decides nothing, that the competitors themselves are half-embarrassed to be playing, and it will still pull a Saturday-night crowd off their sofas and into their pubs and living rooms. No one is being paid to care. No one has to. We do it because caring about something that does not matter is one of the better things people do with time that has no other use, and a World Cup is the whole planet clocking off to do it at once.

There is a very English comedy to the specifics, too. England have played this fixture twice before and lost both, to Italy in 1990 and to Belgium in 2018. A wretched record in a game we are all supposed to be too cool to care about. And yet a win tonight would be, by the record books, England's best World Cup showing since they won the thing in 1966. The best in sixty years, decided in a match everyone agreed in advance was beneath them. Tuchel's team could go home with the first World Cup medal this country has held in two generations, and half the country will not be sure whether that counts. Both feelings are correct. That is fandom.

There was even loose talk, a week or two back, of a bank holiday if England went all the way. They did not, so it will not come, and that is its own small grief filed under what might have been. But the evening is still here. The match is still on: England against France, live on the BBC, kick-off at ten. The kettle goes on late, and for ninety minutes a few million of us will pour real feeling into a game that means nothing at all.

When the work is done and the trophy is somebody else's, we still turn up. For each other, on a Saturday, for something that does not matter and therefore does.