The Guardian's World Cup archive display

If you had visited The Guardian's newsroom in Kings Place whilst the World Cup was on, you would have been able to see a wall featuring print-outs of our coverage of the previous 15 tournaments, from 1950 in Brazil to 2006 in Germany . Put together by Richard Nelsson , our Information Manager, it showed not just how the design of the newspaper had changed during those 56 years, but how reporting of football's biggest tournament had become more prominent. In 1950, England being beaten by the USA barely merited a couple of paragraphs in the Manchester Guardian, and the image on the front page after England's World Cup victory in 1966 was a map of Nigeria. Losing the semi-final to West Germany in 1990, however, saw the England team very much the focus of the print front page. And the archive also shows us that the ' pay the penalty ' pun for World Cup shoot-outs has had a long history amongst our headline writers. The print-outs also raised an interesting question about how we preserve the digital versions of our sports reports. You can still just about see how our 2002 World Cup coverage looked online, but many of the individual match reports and articles have been migrated into our current templates. We've archived the content, but not their contemporary appearance. For this year's coverage , we had innovations like the Twitter replay . It is difficult to predict how long something like this will be available for. We aim for content to be permanent on the web, and you can still play the interactives that were made 6 years ago for Euro2004 , but with many people predicting the death of Flash, who knows how long web clients will be equipped to play swf files? Still, at least we now acknowledge the FIFA World Cup as an official championship. In 1930, days after the first World Cup finished, the Manchester Guardian published a 'Press Association Foreign Special' report describing Uruguay and Argentina as 'finalists in the recent so-called world's championship'. I've posted some more pictures of both the analogue and digital versions of The Guardian's World Cup archives on my own blog.