The impossible search for the perfect World Cup pub

What makes a good pub during the World Cup? I have mulled this at length over the course of my lifetime, from those heady after-work beers during South Africa 2010 (my first job, I was convinced Emile Heskey was going to have a generational tournament so invested in a bright red ‘HESKEY #21’ shirt that became more embarrassing to wear as the summer went on, eventually gave up on a lot of the England games and started to get good at darts) through the Technicolor fizz of Brazil 2014 (watching the Luis Suárez bite on the most washed-out projector screen I have ever squinted at, 200-deep at the bar and unable to move my arms, craning my neck to look at nothing, bursting out en masse into the night, sweltering and freezing at the same time, still not really understanding what happened that year with Neymar) to those first fanzones of 2018 (I watched England win its first penalty shootout in a generation on my birthday, bucket hats in the air and plastic cups of beer in front of a pulsating air-con unit, the toilets weren’t real toilets they were sort of… it’s hard to explain). The answer, possibly? “There isn’t such a thing as a good one.”

Hear me out. Pubs are not designed for this. It feels, naturally, like they should be, but they aren’t. Pubs are meant to have a quiz night on a sleepy Tuesday, be pleasingly mostly empty on a Wednesday, Thursday it starts to fill up with the real buzz of real partiers who know that “Thursday is the new Friday”, then Friday it’s meant to go from after-work-rammed to Friday-night-decadent-rammed. Saturday I want them pin-drop silent by day and alarming by night, and Sunday ideally the ones that don’t serve roasts are burblingly half-filled for the early kick-off (and I can get on the pool table a bit) and the ones that do serve roasts are filled up with, well, “roast dinner people”. Have you ever tried to watch an FA Cup final in a room designed for all this? It’s carnage. It’s untenable. The World Cup is 104 FA Cup finals in a row.

How is this going to work? In my dream Moon Under Water scenario, it is this: the pub by my house is inexplicably still only half-full despite there being 10 minutes to kick off, so I can easily find either a table or a good lean by the bar. This is crucial: every member of staff working today has both been in and worked in a bar before in their life, and knows how to pour beer, what order to serve people in, and has some sort of object permanence ability so they always know where the card machine is. This is crucial: the person in charge of the remote control has a normal sense of hearing, and also has used a remote control in their life.Beers are being poured into real pint glasses because everyone respects the landlord too much to do anything mad. The carpet is ornate and sticky. The kitchen upstairs does moderately OK pizza. Someone has cleaned the bathroom at least once in the last 10 years. There are multiple TVs and projectors so all angles of the pub can see the screen, but they are running from a central hub (the landlord’s nephew is “good with computers”) so there is no delay in the action between any of them. I play a game of Around The World at half-time – in the 15-minute interval, the analysis is muted and four of my favourite songs from the year 2008 are played, including remixes – and demolish my opponent with a treble 18 and a bullseye, and some women see it happen. I am easily able to get transport home. I go to bed with a smile on my face, and seven pints in my body. England win the World Cup.

Here’s what’s actually going to happen: the pub by my house has “gone ticketed” for the big games, and articulated this via a Facebook post that I did not see – because who follows a pub on Facebook? – so myself and 10 friends and six of their mates who I don’t really know or like are turned away at the door. After wandering the streets cluelessly for the first 20 minutes of the game, we squeeze our way into a place that is heaving with men wearing those hollow, soulless DHgate shirts, shouting “come on!” every few seconds in a way that makes me feel chillingly empty, like wind is blowing through my body. The barmaid has never heard of Stella Artois despite me actively pointing at the tap that pours it, and looks at me in repulsion for having the temerity to ask (eventually someone else serves me: a round of three pints costs £26). At half-time I queue up for 14-and-a-half minutes to piss in a trough – I am the only one adhering to the unspoken rules of queuemanship – while Waka Waka (This Time For Africa) is played four times at the decibel level of a jet engine. A disallowed goal sees one thousand plastic cups of beer thrown in the air and right when I am about to be served, everyone who threw one crams the bar. My friends have stayed in one position but I cannot move through the crowd to get to them so I stand in a space and watch the game in silence on my own, sort of near a bloke who says his “friend is standing there” but the friend never arrives. I just stand there but do not relax. The same man tells me off for sending exactly one text off my phone. I go home and none of the Limes work and Uber spins around endlessly on the map. Buses are too full so I walk for four miles with no battery left in my headphones. England do not win the World Cup.

A lot of people are going to text me this summer, and probably you, too. “Game later?” they will say. “We should go to a pub!” It’s not going to work like that. You fools, you buffoons. I need to tell you something: the best place to watch the game is at someone’s house. Take two big bags of crisps as an offering and sit on the sofa, and shut up.

Illustration by Jason Ford for The Observer