The daily French sports paper L'Equipe, which put 60 reporters onto the job of covering the World Cup finals and produced 20 pages on the tournament every day, was rewarded when the latest sales figures came out.

The number of copies sold rose by between 20 per cent and 30 per cent on "normal" days and by as much as 50 per cent on the days after the French national team played a match.

Following the French victory over Italy in the quarter-finals the paper printed 960,000 copies with the recently-launched L'Equipe Sunday edition selling 350,000 copies without the investment of any advertising campaign whatsoever.

Le Monde, which is the daily bible of the literary and political intellectual classes in France, broke away from years of tradition when it led its front page with the result of the World Cup final. An enormous step for a paper which refused to even cover sport until three years ago, but brought out a daily supplement for every day of the competition.