As national humiliations go, this was not the Suez Crisis but when BBC Sport announced it would be basing its World Cup coverage in Salford (the city in Greater Manchester, not the small town in Pennsylvania), cheeks were puffed out, eyebrows were raised, heads were shaken.The Daily Telegraph described the BBC’s approach as the “work-from-home World Cup”, while television network GB News claimed the corporation was “set to lose out” to rivals in signing up tournament pundits. For these culture-war critics, and others, the decision seemed to be another sign of Great Britain’s 150-year decline, the BBC getting it wrong again and a victory for small-minded penny-pinchers.These sentiments were perhaps best summed up by Gary Lineker, the former England star who was meant to be the BBC’s lead presenter for a seventh straight men’s World Cup before a social-media mishap led to a high-profile divorce last year, when he said he was glad he would be presenting his new Netflix show from a bespoke studio overlooking New York’s Times Square and not stuck in a “green box in Salford”.It was a good line but it was wrong.His successors — the revolving trio of Kelly Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan — will not be forced to pretend they are somewhere exciting while sitting in front of a brightly lit green screen that is magicked away by video editors and overlaid with something worth watching.On the contrary, as I learned when the BBC invited some journalists to see their new studio this week.“It’s not a green box in Salford, it’s a beautiful, state-of-the-art studio, but that’s fine, nobody had seen it until now,” said BBC director of sport Alex Kay-Jelski, the man who joined the BBC from The Athletic in 2024 and ultimately made the decision for football to stay at home.In fact, the studio does not use green screens at all, so the presenter and pundits can wear green and/or sequins without fear of becoming invisible in the ‘chroma keying’ process. (Quick aside, if you are wondering why green screens are green, it is because green is the most distinct in hue from any human skin tone.)With its commercial rivals ITV having broadcast the tournament opener between Mexico and South Africa on Thursday, the BBC’s first game is Canada versus Bosnia and Herzegovina on Friday, when Logan, former France striker Olivier Giroud and ex-England defender Micah Richards will try to prove that being perched high in a Brooklyn loft apartment (ITV’s base for the next six weeks) does not equate to better football coverage.