Here is the dirty secret of this World Cup: it's poor. Yes, the Germans are friendly, yes, their team is good, yes, they even organised nice weather, and it must be fun for them to wave their flags. But if you're not German it's a bad tournament. And I say this not merely because I have spent the past 18 days sleeping in 15 different beds (alone) while living on sausage fat.

In theory, the World Cup is where you see the best teams in the world. In practice they have adopted a sort of Kyoto protocol for energy conservation. England, Portugal, France, Brazil and Italy have been doing just enough to scrape through. For the superstars, this is their working holiday between two hard seasons. The coaches should pick hungry youngsters instead, but the media forces them to stick with the superstars. Thus England are fielding four superstar playmakers who all want the ball to feet. The two most exciting players here, the youngsters Lionel Messi and Robinho, only appear occasionally as substitutes.

Only Germany, Spain and to some degree Argentina have gone for youth, and they have played the best football here. In the case of Argentina, that means one game against Serbia and Montenegro and some decent spells against Ivory Coast. For Spain it was a cracker against Ukraine and 30 good minutes against poor Tunisia. Germany have beaten Costa Rica, Poland, Ecuador and Sweden at home. After 54 matches we have had precisely zero clashes between top-class teams playing well. Let's hope we get at least one in the remaining eight matches.

The established teams have been able to conserve energy because they are so much better than the others. When Switzerland lost to Ukraine on Monday night, it was the first time a western European or South American team had lost to a team from outside those regions. You could have made stacks betting on this rule.

Underdogs at World Cups used to be spectacularly terrible, like Zaire in 1974, or weird, like the Australian amateurs in 1974 with their skintight Aussie Rules shorts, or excellent, like the Cameroonians of 1990 who beat Argentina, the world champions, in the opening match.

Now the 13 teams from Africa, Asia and North and Central America are simply mediocre. Terrified of taking a caning, they keep eight super-fit players behind the ball. It turns out that almost anyone can do it. Trinidad and Tobago, for instance, only conceded four goals in three World Cup matches, but I suspect that a well-drilled select eleven of Financial Times readers could have done just as well. The fact that approximately 27 of the teams here are not competing for the title removes much of the point.

Not only do all the teams have the same style, but so do all the fans. There is now a universal uniform of team shirt, face paint and cheese-eating grin copied from television advertisements featuring football supporters.

Switzerland against Ukraine, possibly the worst sporting event I have ever witnessed, even worse than England's games, lost some of its unique horror and segued into mass-produced mediocrity because the Swiss fans sang a song ripped off from the Germans: "Stand up if you are Swiss [or German, or Inuit - fill in desired nationality]." Swiss fans, in so far as they previously existed, used to jingle cowbells but now they probably can't get them through security. Many of the supposed foreign fans here are in any case Germans in disguise.

The best way to recapture the old diversity would be to abolish television. This would be easier than reducing the number of teams from 32 to 16, the number that played in 1978. No one ever got elected president of Fifa, football's world governing body, by promising continents fewer places at World Cups. Soon, the Solomon Islands v Western Sahara (0-0).

I just checked on the internet, and it says the world outside the World Cup still exists. Sitting in the "media centre" in Dortmund (I think) surrounded by thousands of journalists at the biggest media event in history, I wonder why you are watching. I was astounded to learn that 19m French people, the country's biggest television audience of the year, saw France's predictable 0-0 draw in the opening match against Switzerland. Do you all still care? Wouldn't you rather be working? Will you switch on again in 2010?