Laying into Sepp Blatter has become, since Steve McClaren’s replacement by Fabio Capello, the first refuge of the lazy. The Fifa president, for all his faults, is a football lover. I once asked him what could be done about linesmen’s persistence in favouring the defensive side with marginal offside decisions.

“Ach,” he said (or words to that effect), “I just wish they’d keep their flags down all the time — they’d make fewer mistakes than they do now.” A man of such sharp words may be forgiven a lot.

Under Blatter’s stewardship, the game has improved — not least in terms of offside, at which assistant referees have become better and more positive since that conversation. But he must be pulled up and given a history lesson in response to something he said the other day in South Africa, where his zeal for diplomacy, not for the first time, let him down. The qualification of Capello’s team for the World Cup finals was a wonderful thing, Blatter said, not only because their fans would pour money into the South African economy but because England was the game’s “motherland”.

Not my game’s, it isn’t. Or yours. Not if you like a nice pass, or clever tactics, or a lovely piece of skill.

Only if your idea of football is a 22-man brawl could England be said to have mothered, or fathered, it.

England invented football in the sense that an Irishman invented the lavatory seat; an Englishman invented the hole in the middle. Truly it is almost as bad a joke to credit the English for having parented something that remained a juvenile delinquent until the Scots devised passing; that acquired a greater intellect only when the central Europeans got into tactics; and that completed its development into a sort of universal art form only when the Brazilians proved poetry in motion effective by winning three World Cups between 1958 and 1970.

What the English had invented was fighting with a ball. You can see it in the prints of the 1820s and thereafter. Even in the latter half of the 19th century, when it thrived in the public schools and was seized upon by advocates of “muscular Christianity”, its virtues included alternative employment for young men’s hands, which could be used to guide the ball. When at Rugby the codes separated, the wonder is that anyone noticed the difference; in rugby, I suppose, you could carry the ball, but football continued to accentuate the physical.

The Laws of the Football Association were first drafted in Barnes, southwest London where I live, within a short walk of 26 The Terrace, where Ebenezer Morley in 1863 devised rules featuring an entitlement to catch the ball and, by making a mark with a heel, earn a free kick. The first match, between Barnes and Richmond, was goalless.

International matches began in 1872, in Glasgow, and, although England escaped with a draw on that occasion, they were usually beaten by the Scots, sometimes as heavily as 7-2 or 6-1, winning only two of the first 16 encounters. The Scots, tending to be smaller, had come up with the idea of passing the ball to each other and this flummoxed the English. Passing was the hole in football’s lavatory seat and in time even the English came to recognise it, their clubs being so eager to engage these wily foreign techniques that Scots were tempted south, becoming the first professionals.

We then had a semblance of what is now known as English football and the national team were so successful that, in 1908 and 1909, they played three matches each against Austria and Hungary and one against Bohemia, winning the seven games with an aggregate score of 48-7. So the central Europeans, in their turn, got to thinking.

With Jewish coaches to the fore, they came up with ideas on tactics, technique and conditioning that led to defeats for England in Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Only eight years after the end of the Second World War, the Hungarians came to Wembley and gave their famous tutorial in winning 6-3. But the truth, as every Scot could demonstrate, was that the English had never been masters even of their own domain.

They had been good missionaries: Charles Miller, for example, who learnt football at school in Southampton and played for St Mary’s (although he had been born in São Paulo of a Scottish father and Brazilian mother), lit the flame in Brazil. Not that the Brazilians were very good until they, too, received tuition from the central Europeans in the form of Dori Kürschner, a Jew who had fled Hungary in 1937.

This is not to deny the contributions to the game of Herbert Chapman or a host of influential English coaches from Jimmy Hagan to Bobby Robson. It is merely to ask that we drop the motherland bit. Even England’s bidders for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup have been wise enough to do that. Meanwhile, of course, there is Brazil in 2014. That’s when my kind of football’s coming home.