SEPP BLATTER certainly raised a few eyebrows with his surprising hotpants initiative. In a burst of the kind of free-association, blue-sky thinking that is characteristic of the man and his regime, the President of Fifa, football’s world governing body, suggested that the women’s game might gain immeasurably if the women would only agree to wear skimpier nether garments.

“Let the women play in more feminine clothes, like they do in volleyball,” Blatter declared this week. (The President, we should note, is pretty much the only orator still using the exhortatory imperative form favoured by the Emperor Augustus and the other great chiefs of Roman history.) “They could, for example, have tighter shorts,” he added, hopefully. “Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men, such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?”

Why not, indeed. The President’s logic is impeccable — leaving aside the bit about the lighter ball, obviously, because women, in fact, use the same size, weight and shape of ball as the men. That’s a detail that you might have backed the President of the world governing body to have at his fingertips, or, at the very least, at his secretary’s fingertips.

You might also have tipped Blatter, of all people, to know that you couldn’t really get a ball any lighter than the one insisted upon by Fifa regulations without it qualifying technically as a balloon.

Quibbles aside, though, one can only speculate upon the increased respect that awaits the women’s game and its 30 million registered players worldwide if those pretty little things start dressing to please the game’s most senior administrator. As they say at Fifa: “Bums in shorts is bums on seats.” But can you force these things? Is not the length of a footballer’s shorts subject to circumstances beyond even Fifa’s power to control?

It has long been acknowledged that football presents an inverse version of the famous social law regarding skirt lengths. Skirts are observed to shorten in boom times (the Sixties) and lengthen during recessions (the Seventies). Football shorts, however, lengthen during periods of plenty (the Stanley Matthews era, the late Nineties) and then get cut right back to the crotch when the going gets almost intolerable (the Eighties).

True, this economic barometer — length for boom, shortness for bust — isn’t 100 per cent reliable. If it was, Leeds United would be wearing shorts so tight you could make out the players’ bladders through them. Certain clubs in the Nationwide League would not be wearing any shorts at all. But it’s a rule of thumb and not necessarily something a Fifa administrator can just bash past at will. If Blatter really can bring about an age of short shorts simply by decree, then he may be more Roman and imperious than we have even begun to think.

Still, whatever the logistical problems involved in getting this initiative up and running, one has to applaud Blatter for standing up for “aesthetics”. And one only hopes he has the energy to turn his visionary zeal on his own organisation and himself. Consider the Blatter we see now on formal Fifa occasions, such as the draw for the World Cup. As he stands up there, cracking open those plastic eggs and saying “Sweden”, he just looks like a man in a suit, doing a job.

No disrespect to Sepp but, let’s face it, there’s little there to detain the casual viewer, let alone the picky aesthete. Couldn’t he cast aside the traditional shirts and ties and put on a flimsy top offering a tantalising glimpse of his nipples? Or what about waxing his chest and going for the topless look, with some silk drawstring harem pants? It would be something for the ladies. It could also be a way of reaching out to the gay community, which football has been woefully slow to do.

Once initiated at the top of the tree, there is no reason why the directive couldn’t spread profitably down through the lower branches of football administration. You look at Gordon Taylor, of the Professional Footballers’ Association, speaking out on the Rio Ferdinand issue, and you think: leave the Burton’s suit in the closet for once and live a little. Get a little S & M on us with a studded leather collar and a tight black bustier: change a few people’s attitudes.

The same goes for Mark Palios at the FA. He’s always nicely turned out, but . . . dull, dull, dull, Mark. Think of the benefits that would accrue to the game if you wore something less Soho Square and more Spearmint Rhino. Consider it as a Fifa-endorsed key strategy in the game’s struggle to win hearts and minds.

Nobody would think any less of them. Never mind playing with a lighter ball, as Blatter points out, football administrators already use a lighter head than those used elsewhere in the business world, so if they started dressing to titillate, people would just assume it was part of the same aesthetic.