Among the endless post-mortems over why football is not, in fact, currently coming home, one area has been drastically overlooked: ciggies. And while my lawyer insists that I remind you of the many risks associated with smoking — that it causes cancer, painful death, and worst of all, makes you three times more likely to win a Nobel Prize for poetry — my conscience insists on outlining a strange fact: that many of the most compelling and enduring World Cup winners in history were smokers. (The correlation is anecdotal, not medical — though one of the best endurance athletes I know puts his lung capacity down to his former smoking habit which he likens to “high altitude training.”) Here are five of them — with notable omissions including Gianluca Vialli of Italy, who lit up a cigarette on the literal bench during Italia ‘90 in protest at being subbed of; Socrates, the Brazilian captain of the 1980s, who smoked forty a day and was known to have a beer at half time but who never won a World Cup; and Diego Maradona, who very much won a World Cup and also loved to smoke, but frankly that was the least of his vices and listen, maybe that’s an article for another time.