If sport is a metaphor, what does it tell of life now? The technical, even artistic, brilliance of the camera-work at the World Cup just ended was well in excess of any footballing skill demonstrated on the field of play. The sad truth was that in more than 60 games no major new striker emerged.
Faced with open goals, most forwards preferred to "draw the foul" rather than go for glory. Manufactured victimhood abounded. Some defenders deserved medals for stoicism in the face of such provocation - but soon entire forward lines may take the field wearing surgical collars in a new football version of the old Compo Culture.
With all the emphasis on caution, soccer has at last come up with a variation of metronomic baseline tennis. The old exuberance of the South American games has been trumped by teams with well-organised, almost industrial, defences. Brazil, in particular, were hobbled by the fact that their two potential match-winners, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, didn't deliver.
All through the past month, managers felt obliged to play out-of-form but "star" footballers like Ronaldinho, Beckham, Ronaldo. These were the faces which grinned out of so many ads for beer, jerseys and games consoles; and their sponsors, not to mention their egos, had to be mollified. Market forces cost matches and deprived many games of a cutting edge.
Some great players failed because they were exhausted after giving months of honest service through the long winter season to the clubs who pay the vast bulk of their earnings.
This, along with the fact that he was played out of his natural position, was what did for Ronaldinho. Sincere year-long toilers like England's Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard also looked spent, helping to explain their country's demise.
David Beckham is another story, more brand than footballer. He is a bleak illustration of Freud's prediction that ours would be the Age of the Actor. Everything from his white boots to his sideline tears is carefully scripted.
So, too, with Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo. His narcissism, self-pitying appeals to referees, and out-and-out "diving" have raised interesting questions about wider trends in soccer and about what the future of sport may hold.
Back at the World Cup in 1970, played at altitude in Mexico, the pace of many games was much slower, not just because of the thin air but because there were so few fouls and stoppages. Now, every other minute, a Ronaldo-type dives in an amazing arc to the greensward, his face contorted by mock agony after a minor graze, before the mandatory triple roll-over and noisy importuning of the referee.
TV replays show that only when contact is made by the defender can a free kick or penalty be awarded. The issue no longer seems to be whether the defender really prevented the forward progress of the attacker, but whether he made bodily contact. And, by extension, the question then becomes how well or badly the appellant acted his part.
This may have been the World Cup at which the notion of soccer as contest began to be replaced by that of soccer as spectacle. Commentators repeatedly extolled "sensational nil-all draws", the kind of matches for which Bill Shankley used to apologise with the phrase "Much Ado About Nothing-Nothing!". But now nothing-nothing leads inexorably to "penalty shoot-outs".
Just a couple of years ago, old pros used to lament these shoot-outs as an inadequate and trivial way of resolving the complex and rigorous contests that preceded them. Not any more. The PlayStation Generation has arrived and its members see such sequences as the thrilling climax of the entire affair. This year, many boys instructed their parents to "call me in if there is a shoot-out". The aesthetics of the final frames of the cowboy western have been effortlessly replaced by soccer matches.
Far from feeling impatience with this method of resolving things, most nine-year-olds switch on their record buttons at this point.
An old-timer, watching all this, might wonder whether it has happened before, in another code.
At some stage in the early 20th century, the old sport of wrestling, in which each contestant tried genuinely to subdue the opponent, was replaced by a mere spectacle, full of feigned injuries, simulated attacks and Punch and Judy-style knockabout.
Eventually, people came to love the simulations even more than the real thing. The results can be seen on TV every week, in the antics and never-ending narratives of WWF, world-wide wrestling, American style.
Soccer may now be undergoing the initial stages of this transformation into pure entertainment, in which the actual contest need have no result other than a theatrical after-effect.
But the derisive whistles and cat-calls which will greet Cristiano Ronaldo for the coming months on the playing fields of Europe are our best hope that the ethics and aesthetics of WWF do not destroy The Beautiful Game.