The World Cup is many things: a festival of football, a geopolitical showcase, a reason for grown men to paint their faces. It is also, stripped of all sentiment, a revenue event for the gambling industry of a scale that would make a Victorian bookie weep with joy.
Who actually wins the World Cup? Not England — we can get that out of the way immediately. The bookie wins, by a distance and with remarkable consistency, regardless of which nation lifts the trophy. The house margin on outright winner markets runs at around twelve percent. On the novelty markets it runs considerably higher.
None of this is hidden. The odds are public. The margins are calculable with secondary school maths. The nation places its bets anyway. This is not stupidity; it is hope, which has always been the gambling industry’s most profitable product.