And people are wondering why the Respect campaign was an unmitigated disaster. Football doesn't need to have referees respected. Referees don't need respect. And even if they did, respect is the last thing anybody who has anything to do with football is ever going to give them.

So here we go again. Tom Henning Ovrebo made a pig's ear of refereeing the Champions League semi-final, second leg between Chelsea and Barcelona, and Didier Drogba and Michael Ballack - two head prefects from St Trinian's - had a bit of a rant at the official. And everyone says it's disgraceful and it's shameful, when the truth is that it's nothing of the kind. It's merely inevitable. And football wouldn't have it any other way.

Yesterday morning there was Graham Poll on the Today programme, busily issuing his own version of a third yellow card for Chelsea's partners in shame. Referees have to be respected, he said. It's the plea of tax inspectors and traffic wardens across the universe.

It is simply not in football's nature to respect referees. Sir Alex Ferguson is probably the most considerable figure in world football: now he does get respect. Everyone respects him - admittedly with varying degrees of reluctance - but he is not only a man who demands respect, he is a man who rightly gets it.

But he doesn't respect referees. Not a jot. When something goes wrong for Manchester United, his first reaction is to blame the ref. For him, they are not authority figures who demand respect, they are flawed and fallible men, to be humiliated and bullied into acquiescence.

But referees continue to demand respect, and to believe that all the ills of the game come down to the failure of footballers and managers to appreciate their skills and problems. Meanwhile, footballers and managers believe that all the ills of the game are down to the incompetence of referees. This all adds up to one hell of a gulf, and anyone who thinks that you can bridge it with respect is living in cloud-cuckoo-land.

Referees are, indeed, imperfect human beings - well, all of us, even journalists, have our flaws. But the principal flaws of referees are not those of popular imagination: that is to say, myopia, ignorance and bias. They are vanity, an overfondness for authority and an exaggerated sense of their own dignity. All referees have these flaws to some extent; many to a considerable extent.

That doesn't necessarily make them incompetent or morally wrong. It's just that when you look for flaws in referees, you are more likely to find vanity than corruption. The referees' demand for respect is based on their belief that they are special people doing a special job, and that their position of authority requires respect from subordinates. They believe that respect is not earned by each individual ref; rather, respect is the moral duty of footballers.

But respect just isn't going to happen. Not in football. Football is traditionally subversive, always contemptuous of authority. Ten minutes at any match will tell you that. “You blind, ref?” “Why don't you put on a red shirt, referee?”, the traditional cry when the opposition team wears red. And oh, the joy of a bald referee, creating as he does a glorious opportunity for the resident crowd wag: “What's the matter, ref? Hair get in your eyes?”

These jokes turn to savage fury when things go badly wrong and a referee can be blamed for defeat. The journey from jocular contempt to open hatred is a very short one. No one respects referees. As with tax inspectors and traffic wardens, the best they can hope for is acceptance. You can't have a football match without a referee, you can't run a society without taxation. All we can do is make the best of the situation. We are not going to start worshipping traffic wardens as gods - or referees.

It would be an exaggeration to say that referees are respected in rugby union, or that umpires are respected in cricket. Certain individuals are respected, but it is something they have to earn. The office itself does not command automatic respect.

However, in both games there is a tradition of accepting officials. In rugby union, a referee operates pre-emptively, constantly communicating with players so that they don't commit offences. Umpiring decisions are accepted in cricket in the knowledge that this is the way the game works.

In these games, the players and officials are not on opposing sides, they are both knowingly trying to create a contest, a spectacle, sport. Players and officials are in a sense colleagues. There is a dialogue between them, an understanding of sorts. As a result, officials are neither abused, nor routinely blamed for defeats. And all that is quite alien to football. In football the referee is an intruder, an outsider.

Anthony Powell writes of a former housemaster, considering him in thoughtful and considered terms. He then adds that during his schooldays, such ideas never occurred to him. Then, he saw the teacher as “a dangerous lunatic, to be outwitted and humoured”. This sense of complete moral separateness is fundamental to football.

Perhaps it is an aspect of the class war, a feeling that any authority figure is by definition an enemy. This mood is caught in Hole In The Ground, a song by Bernard Cribbins. It is a dialogue between a man digging a hole and a “bloke in a bowler” who tells him not to. “Don't dig there, dig it elsewhere, you're digging it round and it ought to be square...” The song ends: “It's not there now, the ground's all flat, and beneath it is the bloke in the bowler hat.”

This subversive tradition, this anti-authoritarian culture, this hostility to the boss class is an inextricable aspect of football. It is a rum survival, a kind of fossil, and it is exacerbated rather than diminished because, these days, all the workers are millionaires and the bloke with the whistle is a pauper.

What football will never do - and referees will never let football do - is accept that there is nothing special about referees. They are neither authoritarian bogeymen nor Solomon come again, but better at running. If we want to end spectacles such as The Drogba and Ballack Show, we need to get referees and players together, talking and understanding each other as men.

But that is the last thing that will happen. Footballers and managers enjoy having a referee to blame for their own failings - and Chelsea most certainly failed when they allowed a ten-man team to score a stoppage-time goal on Wednesday night. The fury directed at Ovrebo was the only way they could escape from the too-desperate consciousness of their own failure.

And, meanwhile, referees enjoy the mystique of their office far too much to want to change anything. Football's culture is structured to provide an unending series of confrontations between referees and players, between authority and subject, and it is a situation that is nurtured and maintained by the vanities and fallibilities of both sides. There is an option for sanity, but football prefers madness.