World Cup is going to be sensational – for first time in a generation

Brazil's Josimar during the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, where he scored two memorable goals. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

Certain things are subjectively wonderful, even in their most gratuitous, self-destructive, loveless form – and even when, objectively speaking, they constitute a terrible, humiliating debacle. Take the World Cup, for example. Intended to be a compulsion of thrilling football, it is more regularly a matter of principle trudge, elevated purely by the decadence of its accoutrements: lumps of meat on lumps of fire, living room cans and a slovenly break from reality.

Once upon a time it was all so different and the World Cup was the world's most reliable source of wonder. It has not been a good time for wonder: the Golden variety has been usurped, Stevie's standards have slipped beyond redemption and media saturation of life's every facet means there is almost nothing we haven't seen.

Accordingly foreign football is no longer limited to Brian Glanville, gnarled copies of World Soccer and the imagination; the majesty of the unknown is gone. There can never be another Pelé, Cubillas or Josimar because we are besieged by information about every conceivable player when they are scarcely more than a mischievous thought.

But this World Cup could, should, will be different. To the extent that there is ever a standard approach to football, positive tactics are currently in fashion, the modish formations allowing four players to commit almost entirely to attack. Hell, even Italy are at it, while watching England's final qualifiers was, for the first time in many years, reminiscent of actual enjoyment.

And, despite it all, being in Brazil will help too, not just because it is an inspirational place but by virtue of temperatures conducive to sport. Though it will still be warm, only in Manaus might things be unbearable. The running around required to play fast, exciting football is now a viable option.

Probably the change is motivated more by pragmatism than altruism. There currently exists a surfeit of exceptional attackers, spread widely if not evenly, but hardly any exceptional defenders, let alone defences. So going forward just makes sense. The best way of winning is to try to win rather than to try not to lose. If a team elects to sit back, it will almost certainly be beaten but, if it goes forward and has a good day, it can demand an opponent score three to advance.

More specifically Spain, so dominant over the last five years, are not quite as brilliant as before, the possession carousel that protected a vulnerable defence now more of a roundabout. Meanwhile their likely rivals have improved significantly, illustrated first in last season's Champions League and then the Confederations Cup as Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and Brazil easily handled Barcelona, Real Madridand the national side respectively. Of course, these wins do not prove anything but the fillip is important and it will be a surprise if Spain complete a further knockout stage without conceding a goal.

That the club game has emasculated its international counterpart is unarguable, the last great World Cup nearly 30 years ago, the last great Champions League perennially the last one. Perhaps its most significant advantage, that of familiarity, used to be tempered by a spread of quality far more even than has become the case; many South Americans stayed in South America, and the eastern bloc retained its stars too.

Though plenty of the very best players still moved around, that tended not to happen until they were actually the very best players, rather than the eventual standout in a trawl of adolescents with potential potential. But now, the elite players gather at the elite clubs and the standard has improved accordingly, such that international football cannot compete.

Yet still the World Cup has plenty that club football does not, because the best things in life are driven by anticipation and excitement. Setting aside time for a novel or a box set, then pausing everything to rinse through in a binge of stupefying, consuming joy, is far more transformative than discrete plodding, and the same is so of the various relationships, emotions and sensations available to us.

Only the World Cup can be truly transcendental and it is only the World Cup whose finest games are of universal significance, absorbed into the annals of humanity and epochal in a way that simply cannot be matched. For the first time in a generation it is going to prove it