Hello there, my name is Andy and I'm here to tell you about Heineken. HEINEKEN. That's right. And write about the Rugby World Cup in between times. OK, here are some facts I've learned about Heineken in the last two hours ...

Heineken is truly the world's most international beer.

Heineken is enjoyed in over 170 countries worldwide.

Had enough yet? No? Good. Because this is the killer: more than half of the Heineken global volume comes from 15 of the 20 countries playing in the 2007 Rugby World Cup. You might like to guess which five nations aren't pulling their weight in the Heineken-consumption department: I've never been to Bucharest or Nuku'alofa, but my bet is that Romania and Tonga are probably among them. On the other hand, the USA's single most impressive contribution to this tournament may well be their Heineken statistics.

Kevin Mitchell, the wise old chief sportswriter of the Observer, recently predicted that this would be the most brutal World Cup ever. I suspect he's going to be right. I'm going to make a similar call now: this will be the most business-minded World Cup ever.

I've just returned from the press-accreditation centre in Paris, where, among other things, I was picking up my press 'welcome pack'. I was expecting a small plastic bag, perhaps with a lollipop and a piece of coffee-and-walnut cake wrapped in kitchen towel inside.

What I got was a serious piece of luggage. The kind of thing that gave Holden Caulfield a serious baggage inferiority complex when he arrived for the first day of school. In it, along with more pamphlets than you can shake out of a Sunday newspaper, was a HEINEKEN beer glass shaped like a rugby ball in a presentation box and a 600-page tome on the history of the Heineken corporation.

I'm not kidding.

There are definite signs in Paris that the World Cup is about to begin: in the windows of mobile-phone shops, on the Metro adverts for insurance policies, on the billboards outside the banks. The corporate concept of sport ('One World, One Cup, One Beer') has always been a distinctly depressing thing: it smacks of false significance and a lack of understanding about what actually makes games enjoyable. Of course it is also the source of much of the money that games generate, money that is essential to their running and to our enjoyment.

But really, when the logo 'tackle hunger' is emblazoned at the bottom of every official IRB notice and poster and hoarding in sight, can the marketing men not see the crassness of the juxtaposition they've created? I don't want a rugby-ball shaped glass, I don't want a comprehensive history of a Dutch beer, and I don't want a free shoulder bag. None of the journalists here do.

These are the things, though, along with what will be innumerable other pieces of branding and marketing junk dumped on anyone who participates in this Cup as a viewer, which come with top-level sport. And highly tedious it is too.

But with an expected four billion TV viewers worldwide (don't pin that improbable stat on me, pin it on the marketing men who provided it) in 174 countries (likewise) we're stuck with it.

As the cricket World Cup in the Caribbean showed though, all the hype, branding and merchandise they can muster can't save a tournament from what really matters: the reaction of the tourists and populace in the country where it is being hosted. And while we may now know which brand of phone Frédéric Michalak likes to use, we're not going to know any more about that reaction until Friday night, when the real action gets under way.