Last weekend a man in a blue shirt fell over while playing a game of football. And a free-kick was awarded by the referee against the team playing in red shirts. This made the man who manages the team in red shirts very furious. “Och aye the noo,” He told waiting reporters, angrily.

The man in question, Sir Alex Chewing-Gum, is always very angry about referees. Not that long ago he said one man was too unfit to monitor a football game, and on Sunday he said the chap in black was in an “absolutely ridiculous” position.

I’m with him on this. Referees are a very strange bunch of people that no one ever sees outside the confines of a footballing ground. Seriously. I once met a man who sexes the queen’s ducks for a living. I really do know a pox doctor’s clerk. I also know a butcher and a lorry driver and a man who puts food in his mouth and then earns a living from telling people what it tastes like. But I don’t know a single football ref. I’ve never even met anyone who knows one.

This is because they must, by nature, be a bit weird. I mean, whatever they do at work, they can be assured that half the people watching will want to pull out their lungs and make them into comedy bellows.

The only upside of the job is that you get to boss about a lot of very rich young men, and if they fight back you can make them stand in a corner. Football reffing is like being a policeman, only without the mace.

But, and I’ve given this a great deal of thought, there is no alternative. In rugby the official on the pitch may call on the assistance of a video recorder, and that is fine. It means the important decisions will be correct. But if a football official were to call for a slow-motion replay every time Didier Drogba fell over, each match would last about six weeks.

One expert called last week for players to be asked if they have committed a foul. If they lie, and are subsequently found guilty in a video review, they face a five-match ban. That might work for handball, but what about the tackle that’s only a bit iffy? That’s where you need the little Hitler.

Yes, he will sometimes get it wrong, but that’s okay because football is supposed to be a sport. And in a sport it is nice to win but it doesn’t really matter if you don’t.

And therein lies the problem, because of course football is no longer a sport. It is a global business, a sponsorship opportunity, a massive television event, and you can’t really have one little bloke with hairy knees deciding whether Samsung’s multi-million- pound contribution to Chelsea is rewarded to a greater extent than AIG’s multi-million contribution to the northernists.

We see the same sort of problem these days in all events that used to be sporting fixtures. In rugby big men cover themselves in fake blood so they can be substituted for a player who’s more adept at whatever sequence of play is required next, and in motor racing we have people letting people past while under a “go slow” yellow flag and then claiming they have been overtaken unfairly, resulting in the other driver’s disqualification. We even have people crashing deliberately so that the safety car is deployed.

In athletics, people with scrotums are pretending to be women; in cricket, people pick at the stitching on the ball — for something to do, I suppose; and in Scrabble, my wife claims “jo” is a word in common usage when, plainly, it bloody well isn’t.

Only tennis seems to have escaped the slow, inexorable slide into shadiness, greed and deceit. But even here we find players drifting around the court on crystal meth, in wigs.

Some say the easiest way of ensuring that this ugliness stops is to remove such massive prize funds from the events in question. They reckon that if Wayne Rooney were playing for the love of the game, he’d be less inclined to argue when a decision didn’t go his way.

Really? Ever seen a Sunday league pub game? Honestly, pop into your local accident and emergency centre on a Sunday afternoon and you’ll find half the people in there are amateur refs who’ve been beaten up by amateur players for awarding free-kicks and penalties.

I have spent most of my life watching children play rugby and you wouldn’t believe how they behave towards the refs and one another. It’s often nothing more than an 80-minute brawl with a ball.

I’ve even seen parents put down their BlackBerry, stride onto the pitch and punch the ref in the middle of his face for not spotting something no one else spotted either. So don’t tell me it’s money that’s ruining sport these days because it isn’t.

No. The real culprit is us, 21st-century man. We are simply not suited to playing games with one another any more, and there’s a very good reason for this.

In the past, people were allowed to abuse post office staff without fear of prosecution. We were allowed to shout at our children without being followed home and persecuted by social services and we were allowed to hate whatever country we were at war with. No one ever said in 1940, “But you know, most Germans are decent, law-abiding souls.”

Today, of course, none of this is possible. We must welcome foes into our midst and big signs insist that we remain calm when presented with gross stupidity at the post office. And if our children misbehave we must give them money and a few sweets.

It all sounds like utopia but of course the human being has a temper. It has an aggressive streak. It likes to take on an opponent and win, massively; not to have the game stopped halfway through so we don’t hurt the other team’s feelings.

The upshot is simple. Because we can’t act normally any more, we vent our anger and bile on the sports pitch. We won’t accept rules and we will cheat our way to victory. Banning big prize money won’t stop this. Banning sport, I’m afraid, is the only way.

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