Association football is the invention of the English public school. Eton still plays it. Its alternative name, soccer, is Oxford University slang, from "association", the abbreviation of a word and the substitution of an "er" sound being a bospherine tradition (thus, rugger and footer).
Whatever you call it, football is simply the greatest game in the world. Nothing compares with it for fervour, team-work, technical skill and drama, or the way that it brings people together with such passion and enthusiasm. Our sense of being a single community is never so intense; our regard for our neighbour never so warm, as during the World Cup.
Far from being an opiate for the masses, which is how Marxists have viewed it, it is a creative stimulus. People are made proud by a good performance, even in defeat. Productivity traditionally improves after a World Cup championship. Economies prosper because of the self-confidence, good-will and social harmony generated by soccer, most famously in Ireland after the soccer tournaments of 1988 and 1992.
Dire refereeing
So why is the game run by charlatans, crooks, clowns, half-wits, dolts and imbeciles, as best personified by Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president? And given the power of that wretch over the World Cup, is it so very surprising that so much of the refereeing has been so dire, with potential winners such as Spain and Italy eliminated almost solely through deplorable refereeing decisions?
And though I don't doubt the honesty of the FAI officials, who are certainly not charlatans or crooks, their handling of the Roy Keane crisis was bad management at its most sublime; and as for the master-stroke of publicising a press release which had been provisionally drawn up to respond to a possible rejection by him of a peace deal, even while the peace talks were still under way - genius: pure genius.
So given the nature of the people who run the game, it's not surprising that its rules have barely changed since they were ratified in the Freemasons' Arms, in Holborn in London, 1863, and the vital law about the size of the goal not changing at all.
Yet goal-size, rather than bad refereeing, has become the defining feature of modern football. It's the reason why so many important matches end in penalty shoot-outs, and why the enormously elaborate patterns of play, conducted usually by men of great physical prowess and footballing intelligence, so seldom result in a score.
Those proto-FIFA types in the Freemason's decided that the goal should be so high that the keeper could nearly touch the bar with the tips of his fingers when leaping. So they set it at eight feet, and then, perhaps on the sort of arbitrary principle of triplication that pleases the minds of rule-setters, made the goal-posts three times as far part.
Universal word
Thus was the goal defined, and thus did this mysterious word - it has no known origin or etymological cousins and appeared in the English language out of nowhere - begin its journey into the languages of the world. Apart from "OK", it is probably the most universal word on the planet, both its ubiquity and its size all emanating from a group of men sitting in a pub in London, just one-and-a-half centuries ago.
But by the standards of today, those men were tiny, mere elfin hominids; and not merely were people much smaller than we are today, but they were considerably less athletic. The very act of touching the crossbar required a great deal of acrobatic agility and was in itself a considerable athletic feat.
It is nothing today. Many goalkeepers can touch the crossbar by standing on their toes. They are such superb athletes that the arc which they can cover by diving from the centre of their goal-line is so great that technically there is only a small area alongside the posts which is guaranteed to be beyond their reach.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Perhaps the greatest European football match ever played, the European Cup Final in 1960, resulted in a 7-3 victory for Real Madrid over Eintracht Frankfurt. The loser's score would have won every World Cup final since 1970.
Changing physique
The outcome of the changing physique of goalkeepers - and indeed, their defenders - is what we have seen for World Cup after World Cup: nil-all draws, fewer and fewer goals from open play, and matches decided by awarded penalties and by penalty shoot-outs. In 1986, three of the four quarter-finals were decided by such dubious means, and the fourth was decided by the even more dubious "hand of God". The penalty spot has become the most decisive point on the pitch.
Indeed the penalty is now so important that a major skill in the modern game is the art of winning a penalty. Both Michael Owen of England and Damien Duff of Ireland creatively earned their penalties - the former against Argentina, the latter against Spain - for alleged "fouls" which did not stand the scrutiny of a television replay.
This is wrong. We all know it is wrong. We all know that the greatest game in the world is being corrupted because manufacturing a penalty by manipulating the laws is now one of the legitimate ways of scoring a goal; indeed, against many defences, and against many goalkeepers, it is the only way of scoring a goal.
Making the goal larger would transform the game, and would help rid us of the unfairness and foulness of the shoot-out. It is the simplest thing in the world to do; which means, of course, that FIFA will never do it.