In the latest twist to the Tevez affair, Millwall Football Club are to sue Sheffield United for a hefty wodge of that 26 million quid. In a writ issued yesterday, Millwall asserted that West Ham’s failure to be relegated in the 2006-07 season caused a “black cloud of intense despair” to descend upon the south London club, its officials, its supporters and, most crucially, its players “who, after it became evident on about April 27, 2007 that West Ham might indeed stay up, played out their remaining games in a singularly dreadful fashion, weighed down by misery”.

Suggestions from the press and some home fans that Millwall’s players had actually performed precisely in this manner all season (or, as one unfriendly journalist put it, “like a cut-price job lot of extremely heavy Victorian furniture – wardrobes, tallboys, grandfather clocks etc”) were dismissed by a Millwall official as “just malicious”. He added: “We hate the east London vermin, and the cost of our depression when they stayed up is incalculable, although we’ll settle for three million.”

I don’t know how you feel about it all, this Tevez business. As a Millwall fan I was biased from the start, even though there seemed to be a rough natural justice at the time in the Blades going down and the vermin staying up: West Ham were – are – better than Sheffield United, on paper and on the pitch, Tevez or no Tevez.

However, it seems to me almost incontestable that they should have been docked points, partly for the breach in rules and partly for lying through their teeth when found out. The authorities made a mistake: it happens.

Indeed, with the Football Association and the Premier League, it happens quite a lot, you have to say. But they are not the only mistakes. Mistakes are what football is about, so that we can argue about the “what ifs” afterwards.

It is a marginal game, as often as not decided by human error rather than human brilliance. This is not a Panglossian approach to the Tevez business – that everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds; it’s more to the point that football is not an exact science, nor a science at all, but a flawed human activity which is often unjust – and attempts to make it otherwise destroy something of its essence.

These days it seems to me almost unanimously agreed that we should place cameras on the goalline and have video replays of contentious incidents, as if by doing so we might place the game beyond the realm of human frailty, that a match between two teams will become somehow fairer and more objective and there will be no more “what ifs”.

What a dismal prognosis. Improved technology is one reason for this constant clamouring, but the main reason is that in the minds of too many people football is no longer a game at all, but merely another arm of big business, where every mistake costs someone a definable amount of money. “That ball which crossed the goalline unseen by the idiot referee has cost us 20m quid this season and a larger amount next season, given our consequent failure to qualify for the Champions League”, etc. In other words, the motivation for this clamouring is pure financial greed, where chance must not be allowed to intrude. And yet football is at heart also a game of chance.

Needless to say, it was the late arrival of Ken Bates on to the scene in the Tevez saga which provoked this philosophical meditation of mine. And even if you fervently disagree with my reasoning above, you must surely concur that Mr Bates’s latest wheeze should be treated in the same way you might approach a piece of six-week-old stinking fish – ie, with rubber gloves, a face mask, a hose and a tightly sealed black plastic binliner.

Bates has confirmed that the club of which he is chairman, everyone’s favourite club, Leeds United, may seek compensation from Sheffield United as a consequence for having missed out on contingency payments that would have accrued had Rob Hulse, Matthew Kilgallon and Ian Bennett – sold by Leeds – succeeded in keeping Sheffield United in the top division.

What fabulous nonsense. Perhaps the clubs against whom Rob Hulse has scored 13 goals for Derby County this season should counter-sue; he should not be there, down in the Championship, after all. His goals should be discounted. Perhaps Rob himself could sue – not just for loss of Premier League earnings, but because he finds it harder to pull the birds as a mere Championship player, something that might have occasioned him distress.

Almost everything Leeds United and Mr Bates do makes me feel slightly nauseous; Cloughie was right – nearly 40 years later, they are still The Damned United, perfectly able to instil a deep antipathy in almost every neutral supporter.

Perhaps Millwall should sue Leeds, Jermaine Beckford and the referee for the player’s undetected elbow in the face of our goalkeeper a few weeks ago – a game we might well have won were it not for Beckford’s presence on the pitch (and indeed two goals). Or perhaps we should just sue Ken Bates for being an unequivocal arse. Hulse, Kilgallon and Bennett did not succeed in keeping Sheffield United in the top division, for whatever reason. Perhaps Ken should sue them for having failed to do so. And perhaps Crystal Palace should sue for having been landed with Neil Warnock as manager, which wouldn’t have happened if the Blades had stayed up. Every action has a consequence, which spreads out, in concentric ripples, until almost everything is caught in the wash.

So here we are. Things the game of football has altogether too much of: lawyers and money. And a growing sense of itself as being bigger and better than the human beings who take part in it.