OK, so the World Cup should never have been given to Russia. OK, this was a sign of FIFA’s, and football’s, corruption. OK, OK, OK – we know how the tune goes. All the same, one has the impression that, so far anyway, it has been a happy tournament. There has been some surprisingly good football. There has been no real nastiness, almost no crowd trouble, little evidence of the heavy hand of a Mafia state, and the comparison with Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics which Boris Johnson offered at the time of the Salisbury poisonings looks as preposterous as most of our brilliant Foreign Secretary’s utterances.

Moreover, England are still there and may be there a bit longer yet, may even… but let’s not tempt fate. Equally surprisingly there seems to be nothing, or very little, even for Scots and Welsh folk to dislike about Gareth Southgate’s England squad. It’s all rather strange really.

What is even stranger is that this World Cup – Sepp Blatter’s corrupt child – offers a happy contrast to the ghastly plutocracy of the English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga. The contrast may be illusory. After all, so many of the grotesquely rich young men now displaying their talents in Russia normally feature in these leagues. It may be that it’s the fans who are different. From a distance there seems to be an absence of the hatred that disfigures so much club football.

There’s a paradox about football. It’s by far the most popular sport, perhaps the only truly global one. It’s popular partly because it is such a simple game. Anybody can understand it. It requires little in the way of equipment and it can be played almost anywhere. And yet at the top level it is now far removed from the People.

Today’s footballers are the gods of Olympus come back to walk the earth; they are as famous as rock stars or as the Greats of Hollywood were half a century ago; and, as gods, they are utterly disconnected from those who worship them. Top Premier League footballers earn more in a few weeks than many of their worshippers can hope to get from a lifetime’s hard work. And yet at a time when the super-rich are often seen, not without reason, as hate figures, footballers who can pick up million-pound endorsements aren’t resented. Even the takeover of what was once a local club by some foreign mogul is welcomed – so long as he hands over cash to permit the club to enter the transfer market.

We know too how harsh football can be. We are aware of the boys who are promised golden prizes and then consigned to the scrapheap. At a time when markets are viewed with distrust, the savagery, callousness and corrupt practices of the football market are met with indifference. Indeed, ruthlessness is even encouraged. People who would mount protests against employers guilty of laying off workers will clamour for the dismissal of a manager who is presiding over a losing team.

In short, professional football mirrors the harshness, greed and grotesque inequality of the modern economy, yet escapes censure. Indeed, the worshippers don’t give a damn. It is as if they have taken to heart the famous remark of the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly that football was far more important than a matter of life and death – though Shankly was surely more than half-joking. He was, after all, a man who, when asked how he would like to be remembered, replied, “as an honest man in a game that is sometimes short on honesty”. Short on honesty? You can say that again.

And yet, and yet, this World Cup is not only proving enjoyable; it even suggests that football hasn’t entirely forgotten the truth about sport: that it simultaneously matters enormously and doesn’t matter at all – except of course to the players themselves. In part doubtless because the pleasure being taken in the tournament here, and by English fans in Russia, comes from England’s success – so far – which has been all the more welcome because expectations weren’t absurdly inflated. It’s true that the rather low quality of their last 16 match against Columbia – low quality anyway in comparison with the gorgeous game the previous evening between Belgium and Japan – has served to keep modest optimism from spiralling into the realm of the unrealistic as has happened so often before.

But the fact is that England have played decently and intelligently. Southgate seems to have got a squad that plays with a sense of togetherness and that is not overburdened by monstrous egos; he seems to have assembled a group who, in rather old-fashioned style, seem to see themselves as footballers rather than celebrities. At least that’s the impression conveyed, and one hopes it isn’t just thanks to some neat PR work. Actually, though he has his team playing in a measured and controlled contemporary fashion, there’s something agreeably old-fashioned about them, their captain Harry Kane recalling old-style England centre-forwards like Nat Lofthouse and Tommy Lawton.

Indeed, all he needs is some Brilliantine on his hair to be very much like Lawton soaring above defenders to head a goal.

It’s possible that England may go further. Admittedly they have had only one really convincing win – against Panama. But you could argue that each of the four teams in the other half of the draw – France, Uruguay, Brazil and Belgium – is better than any in England’s half – Croatia, Russia, Sweden. So England have perhaps a marginally easier way forward than they might have been faced with. In truth, however, such speculation is vain. Most matches in a World Cup are low-scoring – the France-Argentina and Belgium-Japan games were happy exceptions – and when defences are tight and attackers anxious or over- eager, a winning goal will often come by chance – or, of course, a penalty.

There is no team obviously better than all the others, and, even if there was, it might not win. I have had a soft spot for Belgium from before the first ball was kicked. They play an elegant game, and any team which comes back in a knock-out match from 2-0 down with half an hour to go and wins 3-2 thanks to a scrambled goal, a header from clumsy old Fellaini and a sublimely conceived and executed winner in the last play of the match has character, nerve and flair. Moreover, lifting one’s gaze from the football for the moment, the national team seems to be just about the only thing holding Belgium together which, on balance, is preferable to seeing it split in two. So a Belgian victory would be good for football because of the way they play, and good for Belgium and, by extension, the EU. (I quite understand of course that this last reflection may have some cheering for “anyone but Belgium.”)

The sure winner – unless something goes wrong before July 15 is very evidently and undeniably Vladimir Putin. He saw the World Cup as an opportunity to show Russia at its best, to present us with the image of Putinism with a human face. And by and large it seems to be working. He has refrained from hogging the limelight and been content to let the football speak for itself; there’s been none of the triumphalism of the Nazi Olympics. This is not only as it should be; it is also clever. It seems likely that most who have watched the World Cup and shared in the pleasure and excitement are going to think better of Russia and, by extension, of Mr Putin and his regime than they did before.  It’s a successful PR exercise, and the good feeling generated will last some time, even quite a long time perhaps. Unless, or until, something goes nastily wrong, of course.