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You might think that it was Italy’s greater ball-skills or stamina or team-spirit that won them the World Cup in the final against France last night.

But you’d be wrong.

Cleary, indubitably – as the pictures ’explicitly’ show - what won it for the Italians was not so much their sporting spirt as their sporno spirit. 

Earlier this year some players from the Italian team recruited Dolce & Gabbana (or was it the other way around?) to produce a spornographic fashion shoot of them all oiled up and ready for action in the locker-room.  In hindsight we can see that the world was theirs for the asking/at their feet (etc. etc.) from that moment on.

Sporno, the post-metrosexual porno aesthetic that sports and advertising are using to sell us the male body is, well, irresistible.  Even for the French – who were, let’s face it, a much uglier bunch.  First Portugal defeat England because Ronaldo is tartier than Becks and swoonier than Rooney, then Italy defeat France because the punters would much rather celebrate with them in the locker-room than the French. 

It’s no longer enough for the male body to be presented to us as desirable, or desiring to be desired, as it was in the early days of metrosexuality.  This doesn’t proffer an intense enough image.  It’s not shocking or arousing enough any more.  In fact, it’s just too… normal.  Now the male body has to promise us an (immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped) gang-bang in the showers.

Though of course, because this is sporno and not actual pornography, it remains just that: a promise.  Advertising offers us not just a fetish of the spo/urting male body but also of his… underwear.  Commodity fetishism is usually the name of the sporno game, just as it was for metrosexuality.  However, the homoprovocative nature of sporno is much less easy to disavow than it was in metrosexuality. 

I mean, just look at the pictures.

One of the especially peculiar – and frustrating – effects of a spornographic world however is that more and more men at the gym tend to wear their underwear or trunks in the showers .

Which seems to me to be really dirty.