Arsenal: a nation mourns. They lost the Carling Cup final, despite playing better than Chelsea. They were knocked out of the FA Cup, despite playing better than Blackburn Rovers over two matches. They have lost all chance of winning the Barclays Premiership, despite playing better than Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool. They are in danger of failing to qualify for the Champions League next season, despite playing better than all the clubs below them. And now they are out of Europe’s premier club competition this season, despite playing better than PSV Eindhoven over two legs and playing better than all eight clubs that remain in the competition.

It’s not really fair, is it? But then Arsenal’s football was not better in terms of goals and victories and all that; it was better morally. Arsenal play the right way. They play with style and brio, with beautiful passes, with intricate patterns, with wit and charm. They also play with youth, plucked from the ranks and taught to seek and find greatness.

This season Arsenal produced a team of pure and dizzy talent, the distilled essence of football. They embodied every kind of footballing virtue. Question: does defeat in four competitions destroy the moral argument? Does rightness depend on victory? Or is there really a right way and wrong way to play? Is it better to lose the right way than win the wrong way?

After one season in which Arsenal had the upper hand over United, Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, said that his team may have lost, but they played the better — ie, the more attractive — football. The comment of Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, has gone into legend: “Everyone thinks he has the prettiest wife at home.”

But this season, Arsenal really are the prettiest. None but the most besotted and uxorious of one-eyed fans can deny this. They are better than everyone else, but not good enough to win anything. Where does that leave us?

Well then, what does being the best, the prettiest and most morally perfect football team entail? It is not a question of good behaviour, keeping to the rules, not diving, not kicking opponents. Arsenal have been guilty of all these things, but that does not contradict the belief that they play “the right way”.

No, a team that play “good” football are one that please the senses of the observers. They are just nicer to watch. There is unquestionably an aesthetic dimension to football. The famous Danny Blanchflower dictum — that the game is not about winning but about glory and doing things in style — still has a deep resonance.

In 1988, when Liverpool played Wimbledon in the FA Cup Final, people wrote that Liverpool were “playing for the good name of English football”. Liverpool were morally good because they played a game based on passing and cute triangles. Wimbledon were morally bad because they lumped the ball up the middle at a beastly centre forward. One team were moral, one team were immoral. The immoral team won 1-0, proving what?

In the early 1980s, football people were outraged by the theory of POMO: the Position Of Maximum Opportunity — ie, whack the ball into the penalty area as many times as possible and it will end up in the net by sheer statistical inevitability. This was rejected by many as heresy, not just because it is less effective than pretty football, but because it is morally wrong.

Cesc Fàbregas, the heart and soul of the young and lovely Arsenal team, rebuked Mark Hughes, the Blackburn manager and a former Barcelona player, because his team — successful against Arsenal in the FA Cup replay — did not play “Barcelona football”. As if this failure was a moral outrage.

Blackburn played defensively, sought to stifle and intimidate, imposed themselves as far as the laws and the referee would allow them. Is that immoral? Would they have been more moral if they had, despite lacking the playing resources, attempted to play like Barcelona (or, for that matter, Arsenal) and lost 4-0? You tell me. We all know that football has no marks for artistic impression, but as a neutral I still wanted Arsenal to win. I can argue long and hard and probably correctly that Arsenal’s moral stance is utterly bogus, but I am still a sucker for glory and doing things in style.

We all are, except when we have partisanship to deal with. In the rugby union World Cup of 2003, England were criticised for their lack of style. Is that all you’ve got? Look at the bloody scoreboard, we replied. Style is for wimps, we’ve got Jonny and Jonno.

Yet, when England choose to kick a penalty rather than run it at Twickenham, there are always boos. The crowd wants victory, but the right way, with lots of running and passing and rolling mauls and line-breaking forwards. A bit of glory. So why aren’t the Barbarians everyone’s favourite rugby team? They always go for glory. But it doesn’t convince us because we know that there is nothing at stake. It’s not real, it’s just a bit of fun. We want glory in the context of the search for big prizes and persuade ourselves that there is a moral rightness in that course.

There is a tendency to see all those who play extravagantly as morally right because they entertain us. But do we really want every athlete to be like Henri Leconte, a tennis player who cared little whether he won or lost so long as he went the pretty way? Ilie Nastase was adored at Wimbledon for his style and swagger; he was twice a finalist but doomed to lose. Pete Sampras, one of the all-time greats in all sports, was disliked because he was “boring”; this was seen by some as a moral failing.

In the 1960s, cricket became so attritional, so totally based on defeat-avoidance, that they had to invent a new form of the game. One-day cricket came about because the traditional version of the game had turned its back on style and glory. The primacy of one-day cricket in the sub-continent can be traced to the hideous excesses of negativity in Test matches orchestrated by Sunil Gavaskar, the India captain from the late 1970s to the mid1980s.

Logically, we must always support every athlete’s right to seek victory in whatever legal fashion he chooses. Logically, we must accept that sport is only incidentally entertaining; that the only duty of the athlete is to struggle for victory with perfect sincerity; that when an athlete seeks to be an entertainer, he loses the sport in himself.

But all the same . . . Sobers, Best, Campese, Warne, Pelé, Maradona, McEnroe, Jayasuriya . . . Pietersen, Muralitharan, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Robinson, Federer . . . yes, even Fàbregas, Henry, Denilson, at least to an extent. Style may not be a moral imperative in sport, but sport is more amusing for its presence. To say that style doesn’t matter in sport does not mean that there is no style in sport. It only means that you lack this quality yourself.