A trio of star players have joined the Guardian and Observer for World Cup coverage which is more live, interactive and international than ever before.
Here are a few pointers about how to find the best content online and in print from the sports website and sports newspaper of the year.
On the app you can sign up for match alerts on the country of your choice – with notifications on every goal and every result. On the Guardian’s app you can follow every new development as it happens in our new Live sport button – featuring every breaking news story and every live blog post.
Our daily World Cup news liveblog will bring you all the latest about Russia 2018, while our live scores and tables will update during each game. We’ll have the original and best minute-by-minute reports on all 64 games from Rob Smyth, Scott Murray and our team of live writers.
Football Weekly is becoming World Cup Football Daily for the tournament, as Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning and the team make the country’s leading football podcast even funnier, even more often. And you can sign up for a daily World Cup Fiver – our free/funny email.
We’ve also got the deep dive: an interactive guide to all 736 players in all 32 squads, full of knowledge from experts in each country that you simply won’t get anywhere else. There is the inside track from our Experts’ Network and you can compare your all-time World Cup XI from 12 countries. How does your all time best XI line up against Iker Casillas’s Spain, Cafu’s Brazil, Juan Sebastián Verón’s Argentina, Andreas Brehme’s Germany or Viv Anderson’s England? Relive the highlights and lowlights of previous tournaments in our stunning moments series.
On video, enjoy our special films on the evolution of the World Cup ball, the Millwall coach behind Panama’s success … and the inside track on the Panini sticker obsessives.
Look out for more big interviews, quizzes and interactives in the days to come, including the best analysis of England’s Group G opponents. The sports sections of the Guardian and Observer print editions in the UK are expanding for the tournament to bring the best words and pictures through a packed month of football.
And then there are those star columnists. Former Chelsea star Marcel Desailly, a World Cup winner with France in 1998, Germany international Thomas Hitzlsperger and Brazil legend Marta – widely acknowledged as the best female footballer of all time – are joining the Guardian and Observer to give their insights through the tournament.
They line up alongside our unbeatable first XI in Russia, led by award-winning chief football writer Daniel Taylor. Joining him will be Martha Kelner, sports journalist of the year, senior sports writer Barney Ronay, Dominic Fifield, Amy Lawrence, David Hytner, Stuart James, our Spanish football expert Sid Lowe and regular contributors Jonathan Wilson, Nick Ames and Nick Miller. Plus Russia correspondents Andrew Roth and Shaun Walker will be on hand to tell the story of potentially one of the most politically-charged World Cups in memory.
Not forgetting the smartest commentary from Marina Hyde, Richard Williams, Sean Ingle, David Conn and Liam Rosenior … and our brilliant cartoonist David Squires, twice a week during the World Cup.
