As a 12-year-old boy living in Frankfurt in the 1950s, Hartmut Scherster was known as the king of the autograph collectors.
There was not a sporting event he would miss, nor a sports star he would not hustle.
Even the local journos knew him and would ask him for any interesting bits of information he might have overheard while hanging around athletes and their entourages waiting for signatures.
So when Scherster asked for a job at the local newspaper during his school holidays, he was welcomed into a world that started a love affair with the beautiful game and its global prize – the World Cup.
Scherster is now 84, and Qatar 2022 is his 16th consecutive FIFA World Cup. That means there are only six tournaments staged that he did not attend.
His first was in 1962 in Chile, with the tournament famous for what was dubbed the "Battle of Santiago", a match between the host nation and Italy that required several police interventions to quell the violence on the pitch.
Times were different then.
The referee from that match reportedly invented football's red and yellow cards as a way of settling bad behaviour.
So fearful are players today of yellow cards that teams such as Germany caved in on its much-publicised promise to wear a OneLove armband to highlight the lack of LGBTQI rights in Qatar after the players were told by FIFA they could be yellow-carded for doing so.
The environment for journalists is also very different today.
When Scherster travelled to Chile as a 24-year-old reporter for international news agency UPI, he had to find a public phone box at the end of the day's play to ring his stories through, dictating them to a stenographer at the end of the line.
Mixed zones and post-match press conferences with coaches and players — considered standard fare today — did not exist in the 1960s.
Back then journalists like Scherster would wander into the dressing rooms and have a casual chat to the stars of the game to get the quotes they needed for their stories. Those conversations led to some lifelong friendships.
"Today the stars are not different but the communication to the media is completely different," Scherster told the ABC in Doha.
"They have their own social media. You don't have to ask them anymore; they send it via Twitter.
"All the excitement and the challenge of my generation [of reporters] is not necessary anymore."
There are around 12,000 print and broadcast media personnel working at the Qatar World Cup, which is virtually the population of a large town requiring its own infrastructure.
Reporters and broadcasters are provided with transport, hotels, restaurants and work facilities at each venue's media workrooms.
It is in these workrooms and on these buses you are likely to bump into Scherster as he moves from game to game filing his reports.
Football's changing landscape
Back in the 1960s, he said nobody could have ever imagined that one day television and radio reports would be filmed on a mobile phone, transmitted live to anywhere in the world.
"The whole world has changed in those 60 years, also the football," Scherster said.
Scherster said those changes were the reason why his home country Germany — ranked fourth on the FIFA's standings — was bundled out in the group stage at a second straight World Cup.
He said the job of national coaches was much harder these days as domestic leagues were no longer the domain of domestic players.
The internationalisation of Europe's top leagues – including Germany's Bundesliga – has changed the game but some national set-ups have failed to adapt.
Senegal has more than 500 footballers playing abroad, 51 of them in Europe's top five leagues.
Its national team — nicknamed the Lions of Teranga — is one of the stand-out performers in Qatar. They are the reigning African champions and have climbed to 18th on the FIFA standings. In the early hours of Monday morning AEDT, Senegal will play England for a spot in the quarterfinals.
Scherster was present when England won its only World Cup so far, back in 1966 on home soil. He said it was one of his most treasured memories.
"In 1966 after the final between (West) Germany and England … because I was a member of one of the big world newsagencies we were allowed to go into the dressing room after the match," he said.
"So, I was sitting on the bench in the dressing room … with Franz Beckenbauer and we talked to each other. He was only 20 then, he was very shy."
Scherster remembers exactly what Beckenbauer said in the dressing room after the World Cup final loss.
"He said, 'Of course we are disappointed … but I think I had a good game against Bobby Charlton. I was ordered by our coach only to look after Bobby Charlton, he is a magnificent player and a very fair player'," Scherster said.
Beckenbauer would go on to captain West Germany to success at the 1974 World Cup, while 16 years later he coached his country to its third tournament victory at Italia '90.
He later lead a successful German bid to host the 2006 World Cup.
Scherster has seen it all, and then some. He is like a walking archive, having charted the course of the stars as they rise then fade: yesterday it was Beckenbauer and Charlton, today it is Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé.
Most of those in the media workrooms are decades younger than Scherster. It is unlikely many will ever come close to matching his record for World Cups covered.
So why does he still do it?
"Because I love football and I love the World Cup," Scherster said.
"I keep on working, it keeps me fit and I enjoy it.
"Other people my age go on a dream ship, on a world tour vacation: I go to a World Cup."
Now, Scherster is back on his computer finishing a story he is due to file. Once that is done, he will be back on the media bus, heading to another media centre and another World Cup match.
