The Chinese sage Confucius advised us, in the pursuit of virtue, to avert our eyes from what is unseemly. Unfortunately with football this is impossible.

There is no escape from football. Everything you can see and hear is dominated by footie news, and when there are two or three footie scandals running at the same time, the media can hardly pay attention to anything else, so obsessed are they with what they mysteriously call the beautiful game.

Perhaps, thinking of ancient China again, they use the word beautiful as a delicate euphemism, rather as the Chinese used to call human excrement wagons “flower carts”. The game itself may be beautiful at times, like many games, but what surrounds football these days is an ugly stink.

I’m not so much thinking of the usual nastiness of corruption, greed and beastly behaviour.

All proletarian spectator sports attract all three, for obvious reasons. I’m sure that the ancient Romans had just as many trouble-making hooligans, in and out of the arena, as we do.

Gladiators made equally sensational sums of money and were just as keen on the ancient Roman equivalent of “roasting”; gang-banging groupies is hardly new. And star-stalking was not invented by Rolling Stones fans; at least one Roman empress was rumoured to have boffed a top gladiator.

One despairs of today’s silly little slags, who dress like tarts and go to the hotel of a celebrity they have just met, even though such girls deserve the full protection of the law. But it is hardly worth getting upset about the silly salaries of greedy managers and coaches. Who cares, really? Nor does it matter much if they fill the tabloids with love-rat shenanigans. That is at least a form of light entertainment.

Perhaps it is rather sadder that talented young boys from nowhere who suddenly become football stars go equally suddenly wrong, with their defenceless heads turned by money and fame. It’s not easy to go from a sink estate and a single mother to fame and £50,000 a week. You might have thought that their coaches and managers could advise them and guide them. But then with role models like Sven-Goran Eriksson, one can hardly expect much.

Why I hate football has nothing to do with any of that. What I hate is the strange football orthodoxy of today.

Somehow we’re all supposed to toe the same line about this damn game. You must know about football. You must care about football. You must think football is really, really important. Otherwise there must be something wrong with you. Worse than that, you must be an out-of-touch toff so no one can possibly take you seriously.

Declaring your love for football is these days tantamount to declaring your love of humanity, your deep belief in things that really matter. Of course you may admit you’re not an active supporter, you may not go to matches, but you care. You understand. Failing to declare your faith is deeply suspect.

I first became aware that some strange new ideology was growing up around football about 20 years ago. I was talking to a group of young men friends, all aspiring writers like me, and foolishly let it slip that I knew nothing about football and cared less. “What?” cried one literary Young Turk (now well known), in shock and contempt. “You want to be a serious writer, you seriously want to write, and you don’t know anything about football? I can’t believe it! ” Neither could I.

When I started to unpick what he was saying it became clear — and it’s become much clearer in the intervening two decades — that football has come to stand for something quite other than men in shorts with a ball, or reasonable national pride.