The NBA finals are on at the moment. They’re good watching, too. Anytime a New York team makes the decider of any of the American sports, it automatically adds a dumper truck of extra sauce to the thing. The fact that the Knicks are up against human condor Victor Wembanyama, all 7ft 4ins of him, only makes it more compelling. Question. Did you stay up on Wednesday night to watch Game One? Unless you’re the hoopsteriest hoopster who ever did hoop, no you did not. The game started at 1.30am and finished at 4.17. If you stuck it out to the end and didn’t hang around to watch any of the post-match stuff, you were still going to bed as the sun came up. Godspeed to you if that was you. YouTube highlights did the job for the rest of us.Now. Another question. Will you stay up next Saturday night for Scotland v Haiti? Kick-off in Boston is at 2am in the morning Irish time, just FYI. What about Argentina v Algeria in the early hours of Wednesday, June 17th? Or Norway v Senegal on the 23rd? That’s Haaland and Odegaard against the AFCON runners-up/supervillains, kicking off at 1am. Tempting, ain’t it?This is what the World Cup does. The NBA finals are basketball’s pinnacle, bringing together just over a dozen of the most incredible athletes on the planet in best of seven, crunch-time, now-is-the-moment clashes. It has drama, skill and celebrity star power everywhere you look. But it’s not the World Cup.The World Cup does odd things to sane people. It is its own thing. For the next month and a bit, you’re not going to be watching football. You’re going to be watching the World Cup. There’s a big difference.Nobody’s claiming it’s even going to be any good. At 38 days, it’s going to be the longest ever World Cup. The first few weeks will be pickled with Ghana v Panama and Uzbekistan v Colombia and New Zealand v Egypt, most of it played out at walking pace in the searing heat. It’s going to be so hard to get eliminated from this World Cup that the Round of 32 (!) will definitely feature the odd team that got mollywhomped a week previously.So whatever is drawing you to the World Cup, it’s not going to be the quality of the games. It’s not going to be convenience either. Getting a handle on what’s happening when is going to be a pain – some games start at 5pm, others at 5am. This is the first World Cup for 24 years for which you’ll have to set an alarm. It’s the first World Cup ever that will carry ad breaks in the middle of the matches. Beyond which, the whole raddled, cockamamie nonsense of it all is obviously going to suck, as the Yanks would say. This World Cup is nothing if not a monument to some of the world’s worst people. Just about the only thing Gianni Infantino has going for him is that he’s not as venal, as grasping or as ethically elastic as Donald Trump. But only because nobody is.Fifa president Gianni Infantino speaks during the World Cup opening ceremony in Dallas, Texas. Photograph: Sam Hodde/Getty Images Over the past two decades, Fifa have done their level best to stress-test the whole idea of the World Cup. They’ve treated it like the kids’ game Buckaroo, loading more and more intolerable shite on to it with each passing tournament, as if they’re curious to see just how much it can take before it rears back and knocks everything flying. They’ve made it a plaything for Putin. They’ve played it in a desert in winter. They’ve handed it a mad king who has spent the run-up to the tournament either bombing the participants, threatening to invade them or kidnapping their heads of state. They’ve done all this while expanding it beyond all proportion, setting ticket prices at hedge fund levels and rinsing supporters for every last dime.The World Cup flicking on a random game (hello, Wilson Isidor of Sunderland and Haiti). Photograph: MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images And yet, and yet. It’s the World Cup. It’s wallcharts and office sweeps and sticker albums. It’s flicking on a random game and catching a half-familiar face and only then realising that this guy is from that country (hello, Wilson Isidor of Sunderland and, it turns out, Haiti). It’s imagining what it must be like in Willemstad on the Caribbean island of Curaçao next Sunday lunchtime, as a country half the size of Louth faces off against Germany. This is what Infantino and all the other spivs and charlatans know above all. The global well of FOMO and sentimentality and nostalgia for the World Cup is ultimately bottomless. This is a tournament with broadly six teams who can win it, 12 teams who are cannon fodder and 30 teams who are somewhere in between. Everyone has varying levels of hope and even the countries like us who haven’t come within an asses’ roar of it in decades will be rapt for some or all of it.That’s what they weaponise against the rest of us. We can’t quit the World Cup, even as we are left in no doubt as to what it is. It’s a deathless carnival of garbage, a delusional triumph of rapacious capitalism over the sport’s idealistic roots. It’s a dictators’ masquerade ball, a karaoke session for the petropowers and military ravers who are burning the last of the planet’s embers and rifling through our pockets all the while. It’s a rat-trap, baby, and we’ve all been caught.Can’t wait for it to start. Austria v Jordan at 5am on the 17th, anyone?[ Paul Howard: You spend your life chasing the way the World Cup made you feel when you were 11Opens in new window ]