Martin Belam shares the Guardian office’s Word Cup Wall with us over on his blog, which documented in clippings the newspaper’s coverage of the event since 1950.
While layout remained fairly similar over the years, the importance of football to the news agenda today is far greater than in years gone by, according to Belam.
Even in 1966, when England had just secured the Jules Rimet trophy at Wembley, the Guardian was leading with issues in Nigeria, and framed the England victory through the prism of wage demands.
The next time England got anywhere close to the World Cup Final was in 1990, and by then football was important enough to get a picture lead on The Guardian front page.
It’s an interesting way of looking at how topics of importance change over time in our printing press, which Belam hopes to develop by looking at digital content in recent years.