It's World Cup final day, and the preview furniture is identical everywhere you look: Messi versus Yamal, the halftime show with Madonna, Justin Bieber, Shakira and BTS, and the 2007 UNICEF charity photo in which a 20-year-old Messi helps bathe a five-month-old baby named Lamine Yamal. France 24: "Messi, Yamal come full circle in World Cup showdown." Al Jazeera: "From Messi vs Yamal to half-time show: All to know before final." * And look, the fairytale is real and it is genuinely lovely. Nineteen years ago Messi bathed an infant for a charity calendar; tonight that infant tries to take his trophy. If you submitted this as fiction, an editor would send it back for being too neat. * The Guardian's football section ran the fairytale too — the stats, the omens, the referee. And then, sitting between the data pieces, this headline filed from Atlanta on the eve of the final: "'Where did they go?': homeless people feel force of America's brutality in World Cup clean-up." * The quotes inside are the kind you don't paraphrase. "They dropped me off there in the middle of the night... It looked like a Fema camp. When I saw it, I left, I walked all the way back here. It's because of the World Cup. They're trying to make it look good for tourists. They don't want the eyesores around." And, from the same reporting: "We're not just dollar signs." * Now scroll two rows in the same football section and find the Guardian's other World Cup business story of the weekend: "Fifa to announce record $15bn World Cup revenue, smashing expectations." Nobody at the paper even had to write a connecting sentence. The section page does the journalism by adjacency: record revenue up top, "we're not just dollar signs" just below. * To be clear about what we're grading: lineups and omens are the job on final day, and every outlet on our list did that job competently. The difference is that somebody at one of them decided the tournament's guest list was also a story — who got flown in for the halftime show, and who got driven out at midnight so the cameras wouldn't catch them. * We spend most days here raising an eyebrow at framing choices. This is the other kind of entry: on the biggest football weekend in four years, one football desk made room for the people the cameras were deliberately pointed away from. More of that, please.