Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a substantial complaint about the whole "crisis of refereeing" in Scotland and English football - partly informed by my impatience with the over-moneyed laddism of the game, partly by my understanding of play and games from The Play Ethic. Intemperate in places, but still worth writing. All comments welcome.
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As a from-the-cradle Celtic supporter, and general lover of the physical interplay between men wearing shorts, there are many occasions on which I have felt like giving up on football entirely.
For example, being caught in a riotous train carriage around 5.45 on an Old Firm Saturday afternoon, trying to insulate a terrified daughter from the window-hammering and abusive roister-doister.
Or realising the sheer working-class exploitation involved in today's game, as another wave of high-margin merchandise cascades out from enterprises that are now more like lifestyle brands, or huckster pseudo-religions, than the sporting expression of a community.
Or recalling one particularly memorable sequence from BBC Scotland's Saturday Sportsound, in which the notion of women's football was so biliously abused that you'd have thought a time machine had whisked you back forty years.
But I must admit that the current so-called 'referees crisis' in Scottish (and English) football is pushing me closer to the edge than I've ever been - to a point where no update of the Cryuff turn from some exuberant global traveller (or pale-faced local youngster) can bring me back to the fold, as it usually does.
Listening to the accusations and counter-accusations surrounding the non-awarding of a penalty in a recent Celtic-Dundee United match is like stumbling into some equally pointless dispute between white-collars in a Friday night theme bar, bitching about water-cooler politics.
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno made the salient point 50 years ago: what was most tragic about the "leisure-and-recreation" afforded to the workers was that it reinforced the very bureaucracy and administration from which they were supposedly seeking escape.
Complaints about uninspiring managers and "passenger" players - or adulation of wonder-coaches and expensive paragons - mimic the very positional wars, ambient resentment and career-politicking that goes on in the average "people-oriented" organisation. Never was a "game" more joylessly and grimly experienced.
But what really raises the refereeing crisis above the usual ethical mediocrity of football culture is the sheer idiocy of its premise: that powerful clubs, with high financial stakes riding on any victory, should be allowed to subvert the authority of the refereeing profession.
Who could deny that referees occasionally get it wrong, in the sturm und drang of the average game? North London is currently gripped by the obvious referee-and-linesman blunder in a Man United vs. Spurs match, captured in all its glory on YouTube, where a clearly-visible Man U hand-ball was ignored for the sake of advantage, leading to a klutzy (but decisive) goal against Spurs.
The Celtic complaint against the referee's on-the-day call has been further muddied by rancour and misinformation between the officials themselves, leading to resignations and legalistic clarifications. Columnists intone about "chaos" and "mismanagement" in the Scottish Football Association. Storm clouds gather.
Oh please. What infuriates me most about these disputes is the spectacle of sportsmen, with laptops or without, unable to comprehend the very nature of the phenomenon they are involved in.
Gentlemen (raps knuckles three times on each closely-shaven head): What is a game, football or otherwise? It is the agreement to compete (and within each team, collaborate) under a series of mutually-agreed rules, involving physical movement and equipment, in a set-apart space and under specific time-limits, with a points-scoring mechanism that can bring about clear victory.
Do you know what you need for the very essence of a game to proceed? You need a referee, and the backing of an adjudicating institution, to enforce those rules and conditions.
Here's a thought experiment: what do you have if you don't have a referee? Well, you have what the philosopher James Carse called an infinite game, rather than a finite game. A finite game is aimed at victory under precise and agreed conditions. An infinite game is played in order to keep the game going, to adapt it to bring new people in, to create new rules as you go along.
When children extend their wonderful phantasmagorias, or when hackers and makers contribute enthusiastically to the commons of the internet, - well, those are games of culture and creation that need no refereeing. Or at best, there is a distribution of refereeing among the players themselves, who are relaxed and capacious enough to flip between the two roles.
In my studies of play over the years, I've met many people who advocate the infinite game - beautiful souls all of them. Probably not welcome in any commentary booth soon.
Is there a football equivalent of the infinite game? About the only example I've ever seen are those classic Brazilian beach clips, where three players in the round find ever more improvisational and gravity-defying ways to toss the ball between each other.
I've often wondered whether those sublime skills could be combined with the creation of customised rules, specific to each performance - forging a new art-sport, perhaps more akin to a gymnastics or dance display, in the spirit of capoiera's stylized fighting. Bill Shankly's working-class ballet, taken literally.
But short of punter-imploding innovations like that, we have what we have. That is, football as a money-pumped, gladiatorial, super-globalized and hyper-performing brand war. Now, we've recently become aware of how intrinsically unintelligent capitalism can be - where the very evasion or loosening of market regulation by ambitious, authority-shaping financial players threatens to unravel the very possibility of commercial exchange itself.
Funny enough, in a sport that has become at the top level a kind of ultimate status-display between barely-legal billionaires, they've ended up doing the same thing: heaping abuse and wreaking subversion on a class of underpaid enthusiasts, whose only crime (other than the expected occasional deviations from professional self-discipline) is to make the very game that they're playing intrinsically possible.
As feckless mercenaries and performance-haunted coaches bear down on the men in black, whether surrounding and intimidating them on the park or in the media, it doesn't remotely surprise me that those referees are increasingly making bad calls, or are falteringly getting their stories straight among themselves. They're rattled to their core - and they completely shouldn't be.
At the very least, they should be getting the same respect as rugby referees. I'd even welcome goal-line technology, if it liberated referees and linesmen to deal with the melodramatic, spiritually-bereft diving and faking that comprises at least half of the competitive tactics of the modern football game.
But I support the referee class, and all measures to boost their professionalism and earnings - particularly in the face of a club culture that's become bloated and swaggering under the many billions pouring in from the passive spectatorship and consumption of the Murdoch-entranced, mostly male masses.
And if they don't get the respect they deserve, like the Portuguese refs they should militantly go on strike, for as long as it takes to get it back. Then the football cashocracy will understand what a finite game really means.
For more on Scottish affairs from Pat Kane, see his ideas-blog Thoughtland