Its "This is our England" 24pp issue was printed over a nine-day period and involved 450 hours of production time on Newsprinters’ Manroland Colorman presses at its three production sites at Broxbourne, Knowsley and Eurocentral.

Sun editor David Dinsmore described it as “the greatest print initiative of recent times” in an interview with MediaWeek ahead of publication.

The front page features a Sir Peter Blake-inspired montage of 118 personalities who “capture the essence of England”.

Broxbourne operations director Steve Whitehead told PrintWeek: “It’s the first promotion of its type in the UK. On top of our normal volumes it was quite a challenge, but a very exciting project. We’re all enthused about the World Cup campaign, it’s a celebration of everything English.”

Each copy also includes unique codes for Sun Bingo, produced using Newsprinters’ 22 Kodak Prosper S30 inkjet imprinting heads. The inkjet setup was installed last summer as an integral part of the launch of the publisher’s paywall and Sun+ cross-media loyalty scheme.

Advertisers include World Cup sponsor Coca-Cola, which has included a voucher for a free 1.25 litre bottle of Coke Zero in its advert, and a print-based cross-media promotion from Mars involving a chance to win one of 500,000 personalised England shirts via unique codes printed inside Mars bar wrappers.

News UK teamed with Royal Mail to distribute the promotion, although copies will not be delivered in Merseyside because of the ongoing boycott of the newspaper there because of its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster.

The special issue will be delivered to households today and tomorrow. Via social media @TheSunNewspaper is encouraging recipients to tweet pictures of themselves with it, with the hashtag #DoUsProud.

Newsprinters, along with other newspaper printers, will have to continue to pull out all the stops for the next month due to the tournament’s late kick-off times – such as England’s 11pm BST kick-off for its first match on Saturday - pushing back print and distribution schedules.