The championship game of the 2014 FIFA World Cup will almost certainly pull in more than 1 billion viewers worldwide – and that’s just for the final contest of the 64-game tournament. Some sources predict the cumulative global viewership for this year’s entire World Cup will top the 2008 Beijing Olympics total of 3.6 billion, making it the most popular spectator sporting event on earth.

FIFA’s official mobile app for the World Cup, which it updated last week just in time for the first games, could have done a great deal or it could have done very little – either way, the juggernaut of buzz and excitement involuntarily generated by such numbers would have remained no less massive. FIFA seems to have walked a line down the middle, with a mostly informative mobile experience that doesn’t try very hard to distract you from what’s important – the thrilling action on the TV screen.

Rather than create a designated app for the event, soccer’s governing body simply tucked a World Cup-related medley of live updates, news, built-in social media sharing and miscellaneous information in with its general app, which also includes scores and news from its other sanctioned leagues, as well as FIFA team rankings and an “Explore FIFA” section highlighting the organization’s social efforts. The FIFA World Cup tab isn’t even at the top of the table of contents when you first open the app, but pushed down to the middle of the pack. Situated there, it looks like an afterthought, though once you’ve located it and gone in it opens up and becomes its own fleshed out entity.

Navigating this not-completely-intuitive World Cup section, I kept looking for another, second table of contents. But while that may be buried in there somewhere, I eventually realized the best way to see the different categories was just to swipe between them, which lets you move quickly and pleasingly between, say, the live game stream info stream in the “Global Stadium” and any supplemental info you might want about one of the teams, their coach or their history against the current game’s opposing team. There’s even an area laying out details about all the host country Brazil’s participating stadiums. So if you’re watching a game like today’s U.S. vs. Ghana matchup in Natal, you can distract yourself at a commercial break and learn a bit about the surrounding city, the stadium they’re in and even the poster created to promote the game (or you can get back to work… the game’s at 2:30 PM PST). It’s a lot of random info that can feel a bit arbitrary, but it’s interesting enough

The app’s biggest draw is the Global Stadium, where you can follow the games as they unfold in real time and send in-app social media posts out to the world with the hashtag #WorldCup. It’s all fairly fluid and, after prolonged exposure to this year’s World Cup logo and other related FIFA promotional efforts, the app’s clean, simple design feels like a breath of fresh air.

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