The opening salvo from Adrian Chiles as he announced ITV's World Cup coverage was to challenge his former BBC Sport colleagues to a five-a-side match.

A man clearly much happier at the prospect of watching the world's best footballers from a Rio beachside studio for a month than he was when chained to the Daybreak sofa, Chiles joked that his punditry line-up would easily overcome a team headed by Gary Lineker.

"We would hammer them, probably 10-1," Chiles said but when the two broadcasters go head to head in broadcasting the final live, it is traditionally the BBC that dominates its commercial rival in ratings' terms.

"It's a healthy degree of competition," Chiles said. "We all know each other. Their studio is right next to ours. I wouldn't compare us against them. We've got a different offering. I do it differently to Gary and people will decide which they like more. You could put anyone, a first-timer, presenting an England game and you'd get a 20m audience. I know my place."

It would likely be a close run thing if the punditry teams swapped golf jumpers for goalposts, given that ITV on Tuesday unveiled a line-up who include Fabio Cannavaro, Roy Keane, Lee Dixon, Gus Poyet, Patrick Vieira, Glenn Hoddle and Ian Wright. Andros Townsend, the Tottenham winger who played a key role in getting England to the finals but missed out on the final squad through injury, described his role in the ITV studio as "the next best thing" to being in Brazil.

He will join his namesake Andy, the former Professional Footballers' Association chairman Clarke Carlisle and Martin O'Neill in completing the ITV team. The early signs were that the expressive and erudite Poyet, fresh from delivering Premier League salvation for Sunderland, was a good early bet for the best newcomer on the punditry couch.

The BBC last week announced it had added Thierry Henry, Phil Neville and Rio Ferdinand to its roster for the World Cup. Henry is likely to slip seamlessly into the role filled by Ruud Gullit and Leonardo while Ferdinand will become the latest former player to try to pull off the Gary Neville trick of constructively criticising players with whom he was recently sharing a dressing room.

A beach pick-up game is more likely than in South Africa in 2010 when the two rival free-to-air broadcasters were based hundreds of miles apart, with ITV in Johannesburg and the BBC in a purpose-built studio in Cape Town.

This time the two, who will share the 64 matches of the tournament, will be based virtually next door to each other in identical Fifa studios on Copacabana beach.

In South Africa the BBC came under fire from the usual quarters for taking 295 staff and building that £1m glass studio with views of Table Mountain. This time, it has got its retaliation in first by revealing that its staff across TV, radio and online will number 272 and they will produce 50% more content.

ITV, which is taking around 120 staff, will kick off the World Cup with coverage of the opening match between Brazil and Croatia from Arena de São Paulo, and will show England's second and third group games, against Uruguay and Coast Rica.

The BBC will broadcast England's late-night opener against Italy from Manaus, which will kick off at 11pm BST, and their second-round match should they qualify. ITV's head of sport, Niall Sloane, said he was satisfied with its picks: "We have two England games, two Brazil games and two Argentina games in that first phase." Clive Tyldesley and Sam Matterface will be the match commentators, with Gabriel Clarke as a reporter.

ITV, in addition to hoping that the late push to install broadcasting and IT infrastructure in some of the stadiums is completed in time, will be desperate to avoid a repeat of its 2010 embarrassment when some viewers missed Steven Gerrard's opening goal of the tournament for England against the USA.

With the pay-TV networks BT Sport and Sky Sports dominating domestic football coverage, major sporting events such as the World Cup are becoming ever more important for the BBC and ITV. Not only do they bring huge audiences to the broadcasters, regularly dominating the end-of-year list of most-watched programmes, but for ITV they deliver the so called "water-cooler moments" that advertisers crave.