The World Cup - soccer in general - seems to have escaped its once-stubborn naffness

Everyone has an opinion on what has gone right and wrong with the World Cup. Looked at from an ocean away, the stadiums seem spectacular, the refereeing adequate and the TV coverage up to scratch.

But something has been irretrievably lost. We can’t blame this on the Americans. The decline has been going on a long, long time.

The World Cup – soccer in general, in fact – seems to have escaped its once-stubborn naffness. The vast efficiency of the current competition wipes out the comforting leathery embarrassment the sport once allowed. You know? Pundits in green knit ties. Players pictured smoking cigs in nightclubs. Jumpers for… Okay, we’ll get back to that.

Nothing demonstrates this shift more plainly than the Day-Glo tastefulness of the anthropomorphic mascots. These beasts do still exist. In recognition of the tournament being played across the great nations of North America, the organisers put forward three representatives from three indigenous species. Maple™ the Moose represents Canada. Zayu™ the Jaguar stands proud for Mexico. Clutch™ the Bald Eagle sticks out his beak for the United States. (Given the current corporate nature of the competition, it seems appropriate to retain the trademark superscript recommended on the Fifa website.)

“Maple, Zayu and Clutch are full of joy, energy and the spirit of togetherness, just like the Fifa World Cup™ itself,” Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, enthused. “The three mascots are central to the incredible, entertaining atmosphere we’re creating for this game-changing tournament.”

I don’t know, Gianni. I haven’t seen three more blandly uninteresting cartoon characters since that Benelux-financed kids’ film about Noah’s Ark that I might just have made up.

The beasts have, nonetheless, made some cultural impact. A few weeks ago police officers in Lima dressed up as the trio when breaking up a suspected drug den. “We were able to establish that the person we were about to arrest was a diehard football fan,” Carlos Fredy Alcántara Obregón, of the Peruvian national police, explained. “So we proceeded to disguise my Green Squad personnel as World Cup mascots in order to approach him without arousing suspicion.”

If anyone has any explanation of why dressing up as these three – relatively obscure, it should be said – cartoon beasts would soothe the suspicions of dangerous narcocriminals, I’ll be happy to hear it. Are the burghers of Lima really celebrating the World Cup by cosplaying the mascots? If so, creative naffness may not be dead after all.

Then again. “The era of unique and lovably quirky World Cup mascots went up in smoke long ago, just like one of Willie’s World Cup cigars,” Alex Reid wrote in the Guardian last month.

World Cup Willie was, indeed, the original of the form. Unveiled for the 1966 tournament, in England, the perky lion found his head reproduced on any surface that could retain ink. He even featured in a song by the skiffle legend Lonnie Donnegan. “There’s a football fella,” the great man sings. “You all know his name. And the papers tell us he’s in the Hall of Fame.” Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Willie was succeeded by such apogees of naff as Gauchito the infant gaucho, for Argentina 78, Naranjito the animated orange for Spain 82 and Pique the dancing pepper for Mexico 86.

Can you imagine Coldplay or Adele risking something like the World Cup Willie song in the present day? Indeed, the once-obligatory official team song – Back Home for England in 1970, We Have a Dream for Scotland in 1978 – has been deemed a relic of the embarrassing past.

The current footballing millionaires want none of that naff aesthetic. (Mind you, Scotland did, this year, make a genuine hit of Nick Morgan’s defiantly old-school, unofficial No Scotland No Party. So there’s still a lingering taste for this maligned form.)

When did the World Cup become so respectable? It sounds like a rhetorical question, but the seeds were surely sewn in the summer of 1990. Blame New Order for, with World in Motion, delivering a team song that was actually good.

That was when the English middle classes began discussing the round-ball-no-hands code at dinner parties. Football suddenly looked as if it cared about being cool. The death knell for naff.

Okay, most of these changes were for the better, but there was an awareness around popular culture of corruption in the soccer metabolism.

The Fast Show, which arrived in time for the next World Cup, had two characters reflecting that sad shift. John Thomson played Roger Nouveau, a middle-class alleged Arsenal supporter who, obviously new to the game, constantly blurted out his ignorance. Ron Manager, given life by Paul Whitehouse, mourned the golden days: “Alf Ramsay’s wingless wonders … Small boys in the park … Jumpers for goalposts …”

And, maybe, charmingly naff World Cup mascots.

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