THERE IS A PERFECTLY PREPOSTEROUS commercial running on TV at the moment for an American lager. You must have seen it; a squad of bamboozled and inept US soccer players are harangued by their coach as they try to grasp the rudimentary basics of the game. It climaxes with one of the squad actually picking up the ball in his hands and running away with it as the strapline sighs: “You Do The Football. We’ll Do The Beer.”

Now while the thrust of this advert — those crazy Yanks just don’t get “our” game — may have appeared cute about 40 years ago, the agency behind this campaign seems not to have noticed that in the Fifa rankings the United States sit fifth — four places above England.

Every time it comes on I rail at the television: “But this doesn’t make any sense! This is a terrible ad!” And every time my wife has to remind me that I have no right to say that, given that I have made some of the worst TV commercials in living memory. Nevertheless, it is a curiously misguided promotion. It bothers me. Beer is a product I actually use. And that is why I have been brooding about a way of fixing it.

As it stands, the only way it could possibly be made to work is if it made clear right at the start, possibly via a large caption, that the Americans we are about to see scratching their heads about the offside rule are in fact American Samoans. At a stroke, this validates the whole 30-second pitch because if you care to check the Fifa rankings you will see that there, rock- solid bottom, 205th out of 205 international sides, sits the proud micro-nation of American Samoa. They are the worst team in the world.

Their position is no mere blip either. You will surely recall that they hit the headlines in 2001 after setting a footballing record with their 31-0 defeat by Australia. I mean, whatever team you support may be rotten, but American Samoa are really, really rotten. They may not actually pick up the ball with their hands, but equally they don’t seem to have grasped that those blokes in different coloured shirts are kicking the other way either.

American Samoa are managed by Ian “Chippy” Crook, a man who played 418 times for Norwich City. Well done, Ian. I understand it is a very beautiful part of the world. In fact, that may be the problem. All of the bottom five clubs in the Fifa list come from what sound like idyllic locations. There’s Montserrat, Aruba, Turks & Caicos Islands and Guam. Beautiful. I see thatched-roofed dugouts, waterfall showers and floodlights fashioned from coconut shells. True, these locales do suffer the odd typhoon, but providing you won the toss, even a typhoon might be turned to one’s advantage.

This aside, there simply must be a connection between the luxury of the location and the lowly soccer status of these countries. If it were simply a matter of their size then why would an equally miniature, but freezing archipelago such as the Faroe Islands sit a healthy 75 Fifa positions above the balmy basement sides?

No, I imagine that the swaying palms, happy flying fish and omnipresent lilt of Hawaiian guitars must blunt the urgency of even the most vital half-time team talk. Also — and I’m pretty sure this is a problem that “Chippy” will have addressed very early on — it is almost impossible to train properly with a beach ball.

Beach balls, as anyone who has ever attempted to get an impromptu game going on our coastline knows, fly in the face of all the laws of physics. The harder you kick a beach ball the more likely it is to balloon back behind you. I fancy it must account for at least 20 of Australia’s infamous 31-goal tally.

To underline the theory of Paradise Poor Form, we only have to look to the last, indeed only, game that American Samoa have actually won. It was a 3-0 stroll against their near neighbours the Wallis and Futuna Islands.

The W&Fs are a series of tropical atolls, even more gorgeous than American Samoa, snoozing peacefully just a stone’s throw away in the warm South Pacific sea. This victory took place on the August 22, 1983. That’s almost 23 years ago. If nothing else, this lamentable statistic should make all Sunderland supporters feel a little better today.

Frustratingly, because the Wallis and Futuna Islands are not a registered Fifa team, even this solitary win goes unrecognised in the official record books. Who cares, though? Not the home fans. I’ll bet behind every bar on American Samoa there is a framed photograph of the team at the final whistle that day, joyously hoisting their captain aloft, exactly mirroring how Bobby Moore was carried by his cohorts in ’66.

The barman will pop the top on another freezing cold one and, as the sun beats down, his carefree, bronzed customers will look out across the glittering Pacific toward Tonga and raise their red-labelled bottles. With a deep, satisfied chuckle they will toast the teeming billions labouring away out there, desperately struggling to clear their desks and diaries that they might get to watch at least some of the forthcoming World Cup.