The Olympics Is Porn. The World Cup Is Love.

Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing, and an avid sports fan. He is also the author of the popular CNET blog Technically Incorrect.

Can you remember a single thing the G8 ever decided? Other than that George W. Bush might not be a great masseur?

Can you remember anything about the G20, save, perhaps, for a few rioters flinging curses and purses at uniformed men hiding behind visors and counting their overtime?

The G32 is something altogether different.

Most people call the G32 "the World Cup." Others call it "the Mundial." But really it's just one large meeting, attended by the whole world.

During the meeting the whole world agrees that football, or soccer as some foreigners would have it, is the most important thing in the world. It is, indeed, the one thing that truly matters.

At the World Cup, the only arguments are about tactical systems rather than political. The only hope is that justice is ultimately done. Football justice is more pure than social justice. It generally requires Brazil to win and Germany to lose.

You might be skeptical. But one World Cup year, visitors to Vietnam were given a note on arrival. It was a note of apology. It was the World Cup, the note said. It's not in our time zone. So, please may we apologize in advance for anyone who might seem overly tired, rude or tetchy during your stay? It's the World Cup, you see. Enough said.

In Asia, some people will bet their house on a World Cup match. Literally. Some people in Brazil will throw televisions or, indeed, themselves out of windows if their team loses.

This is not a degree of feeling that, say, Chicago Cubs fans have often experienced. And that prize they haven't won in the lifetime of most living beings is called, laughably (to the world), the World Series.

The World Cup is the true World Series, the true World Championship, the truly Olympic Games.

Yes, many around the world watch the Olympics (save for those on the West Coast who are just so tired of NBC's venal, half-witted scheduling).

But most of those events involve the improbably proportioned achieving the impossibly ludicrous with the help of impenetrable chemistry.

The Olympics is sporting porn. (I am, of course, excluding ping-pong from this analysis.)

The World Cup is sporting love.

While the porn of the Olympics consists of people needing to do it faster, higher and stronger, the World Cup is a far more human spectacle.

It is more accessible, more all-embracing and more important because it has not only the sex, but also the romance.

Everyone in the world plays soccer. Because it's there. Because it's everywhere. Because it just is. Just like love.

Soccer players generally do things just like you. Only slightly better.

During the World Cup people with legs not unlike yours will kick the ball not unlike you towards goalposts that are the same width as the goalposts you make in the park with two sweaters.

It's just that they're little more balanced, a little more talented, a little, well, sexier.

You admire Olympians. But you fall in love with World Cup stars.

Before the Olympics begin, no one has a relationship with swimmers, boxers, skiers, skaters, and especially not with weightlifters. Why would you? They're just passing through.

You try to cuddle up with them for a couple of weeks. But you know it can never work out. Because none of them is glamorous enough, elemental enough. None of them does anything important.

The world's young, the old, even the slightly demented already bring a certain relationship to players before the World Cup starts.

Whether you live in Singapore or Sydney, Dar Es Salaam or Dartford, you watch games from so many different leagues: the Spanish, the English, the Italian.

These leagues soak up the best players as if they are the Broadways upon whose stage stars must play. If they really want to be someone, that is. If they really want to be universally loved.

Those who will watch the World Cup (and, please, there is truly no comparison with parochial events like the Superbowl), come with their hearts (and lungs) open, prepared to be surprised, prepared to be astonished and prepared to think and feel about nothing else for the duration of the festival.

They might bring with them a love for Argentina's Lio Messi, but they also leave their hearts open for others to enter. Permanently.

In the Olympics, it being porn, size is all that matters. Large countries bring large teams of large people in order to enter largely every event. And supposedly super powers claim supremacy.

In the World Cup, North Korea has as large a representation as the United States. Cameroon has as many as France. Brazil wins a lot more often than the United States, Russia or China. Justice can be done, because it's eleven against eleven.

Of course, it being this world and not the next, justice isn't always done. At the last World Cup final in Berlin, an Italian thug called Marco Materazzi provoked a man of infinitely greater talent and class, France's Zinedine Zidane, into a symbolic, rather than painful, headbutt to the chest.

Sadly, an official on the sidelines, who no doubt has a future offering advice about the regulation size of apples to the European Commission, brought the referee's attention to the headbutt.

Zidane was dismissed. Italy won on penalties.

But, just because he was a winner, Materazzi was not suddenly loved and Zidane hated.

The world knew who both of them were before they played that game.

The world knew where the talent and the justice truly lay. The world gave the thug a shrug. It gave Zidane a hug.

In South Africa, stories will be created, sadness will be exposed and heroes will be enthroned.

If you really want to know something about the whole world--its politics, its perspectives, its peeves and its people, this is the only time you will learn anything.

The World Cup happens every four years. If only romantic love could come around so regularly.