In Mediterranean Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, FIFA has leased its property to a fragmentary flotilla of ambitious but often obscure pay-television networks. They are not available in most homes or hotel rooms, even at the high end. In the places where I have been trawling, in increasing desperation, for a goddamn TV set showing a goddamn football game – what could be easier? – the outcomes have fallen into three types. One is to find a public place, such as a bar or restaurant, where the enterprising owners have found a guy who can hook up a cable at the back of the set to someone else’s cable which may lead to a satellite dish connected to a third person’s subscription to the World Cup-bearing channel. Yay! Until the electricity goes down. Boo! Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video The second, most common, experience is to locate a hostelry or open space where someone has a legitimate connection to the local rights-holding channel. This can be a refreshing and typical Mediterranean experience, a little square or an open-air bar heaving with nationalities of every stripe, including the three men who decide to stand smack-bang in front of the TV during the penalty shoot-out to conduct a phone conversation with their friends. You would google ‘Down in front!’ in numerous languages, if only you could get online. The third is to fail to find the World Cup anywhere and give up. Or return to your room and manually search the religious, home shopping, variety and news networks of the non-English speaking world in great diversity all following the same formulas. Even in Arabic, home-shopping doesn’t seem real if it doesn’t look American.

Meanwhile in Australia, the failure of the new subscriber-TV world has been the viewer’s friend. The debacle around Optus Vision’s World Cup coverage has delivered the blessing of returning the World Cup to SBS, a free-to-air, universally available network with decades of experience in curating this particular sport and the experience of watching it. If this is living in the past, can we please keep it? No: Optus's failure has thrown into the spotlight what the world will miss when the World Cup is locked behind pay walls. Credit:AAP The creep towards subscription television is, as the Europeans have found, an irresistible economic tide. Pay-TV operators have the funding and the incentive to gamble massively on buying rights to a tightly-restricted ‘property’ (key word) such as the World Cup. For new subscription services, this is a make-or-break gamble, a loss-leading event driving customers. It is likely that many of them will not exist by the next World Cup, but where the economic ambition is there, FIFA will continue to accept the highest bidder, whatever the long-term effect on the success of the World Cup as a community experience. This World Cup will, in consequence, be the least-watched in history – and not because of the early exit of so many of football’s great powers. In Italy, Spain, Germany, Argentina, Portugal, the Netherlands, the African continent and the Arab world, interest in the event is not driven solely by national partisanship. People would be watching the World Cup in as great numbers as ever, but all too often they simply cannot, because they are unable to afford the package or the access to a new subscriber network.

Streaming services could, and arguably should, offer an answer. Prudent sporting organisations, such as Australia’s football leagues, are coupling their streaming and broadcast options, giving followers the freedom to choose and the potential to find the game wherever they are. In the sport of surfing, this week has marked one of those technological canary-down-the-mineshaft moments, with the World Surf League event in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa sent out exclusively on Facebook for the first time. It seems ridiculous that you can watch a surfing contest anywhere in the world where you can get a Wi-Fi signal, but if you want to watch the World Cup, good luck to you. Loading In some countries, websites offer streaming services narrowcast to paying viewers, but these are restricted to those like Britain where the BBC already has broadcast coverage which it supplements through its iPlayer site. In most countries, to protect its television partners, FIFA has a stranglehold on streaming that makes even the International Olympic Committee look like small-time thugs. It’s all about protecting property values, and if that means three-quarters of the world cannot see the World Cup, then yah boo sucks to them. Or they can just find a bar with a pirated signal. FIFA and their Russian government hosts look like a cosy fit. There is, for smart people with sufficient technological knowhow and access to electrical juice, the potential to set up Virtual Private Networks as a means to tap in. No doubt millions are doing this; but it is a utopian (dystopian?) response to urge VPNs as a kind of futuristic end-run around The Man.