MY family life is currently full of football stories that seem more about hard commerce, and sometimes even harder politics, than anything else. Whereas I’m becoming ever more the football purist. We’re still under a pandemic: show me nothing but instances of the beautiful game, please.

Yet sometimes purism is hard to maintain.

One house of mine is full of Gooners (Arsenal fans, to the unlearned), who were on the rack mid-week as to whether their side would show moral fibre, and step down from their agreement to join the Super League proposals.

Another house is gripped by the possibility of Celtic and Rangers joining an expanded British Premiership. Members are split between delight at the lucrative spotlight it offers, and horror at Boris Johnson’s opportunistic hopes that a “UK Super League” might subvert the cause of Scottish independence.

For myself, I am in a loop with my social media, whose clever algorithms (no doubt drawing on my prior activity) are serving me up clips of astounding skill on the field, from all eras and locations of football.

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The one I return to again and again, as if I were staring at an illusion from a master magician, is from Arsenal’s Dennis Bergkamp, specifically his 2002 goal against Newcastle (often voted the best ever scored in the English Premier League).

Beginning with his back to goal, Bergkamp’s flick curls the ball one way, while his body pirouettes the other. Leaving the defender sprawling, both entities miraculously meet up again. With gymnastic grace, Bergkamp then buries the ball in the net.

Watching this – and all the other “tekkers” and miracle moves that social media serves up to my devices – I know exactly why this element of football thrills me. I was a terrible, lumbering football player. Occasionally, though, I could achieve what my Dad would gruffly urge me to do from the sidelines: trap the ball, son!

I still recall, and feel, the massive surge of satisfaction, that male mastery over challenging forces, whenever I managed to do it. So when I watch Neymar’s nutmegs, or Ronaldo switch-dragging the ball to leave defenders tumbling, or Messi dancing perfectly between bodies, then chipping just beyond the keeper’s fingertips, it’s something I feel in my childish body, tangled up in my relationship with my father.

To control the ball is to control something, in this crazy modern world – and then, to be effective and helpful with what you’re controlling. Any current relevance, you think? I’m sure the computers are picking up on my pulsing, older-male anxieties, and assuaging them with dollops of skillz.

Maybe, in slaking my fitba purism, the software is also sensing how much I’m currently recoiling from partisanship in general. It’s taken a while, but I have now managed to almost entirely disentangle my soul from the performances of both Celtic Football Club, and the Scottish national team.

It wasn’t always thus. I’m hardly immune to the romance of Celtic. My Dad famously surrendered his funds for the Lisbon European final in 1967 to my mother, who put it down as a deposit on their first house. (No greater love hath man for woman …)

Me and my new family were once invited into the hospitality box at Parkhead: I watched at close hand several Lisbon Lions jumping about like laddies whenever Celtic scored. And I’m afraid any football phenomenon shrivels when I compare it to the singularity of the UK’s first European champions, all brought up within a 30-mile radius from their stadium.

I guess that last part has been the happiest characteristic of the mass rebellion against the Super League. Placeless plutocrats cavalierly ignoring how the clubs they’ve bought are historically rooted in cities and towns. So badly misunderstanding their origin as working-class forms of “rational recreation”.

I await to see whether regulation is passed that really gives fans and supporters decisive stakes in how their club develops. To be honest, I have my doubts whether a majority of fans are actually all that alienated from the money madness.

One element of modern football that always makes me recoil are when punters welcome their big-spending proprietors in phone-ins. They lightly lob around tens, sometimes hundreds of millions in conversation, while manifestly not having much of a pot to piss in themselves.

Combine that with the pomposity of the dedicated football channels – BT Sport’s studio seems to be as large as the fighter deck on the Death Star – and it all starts to look like the “Circus” bit of the Roman Empire’s strategy for control of the masses. Even my ancestral connection to Celtic wilts in the face of such crassness.

“Power is only too happy”, said the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, “to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses”. Mibbies aye, JB.

Disengaging the advance of the Scottish national football team from any other kind of Scottish advance has also been a salve to my psyche. I made the snip in 2013, after I had a conversation with a Scots-nationalist marketing guru about “positive psychology” and voting.

Perhaps we could use arts and culture as a platform for the Scottish Voice, I daintily suggested? “A bloody good run in the Euros or the World Cup would have helped a lot more than that”, the woman smokily suggested. Really, I thought, we’re resting our will to sovereignty on something so arbitrary? Had we learned nothing from 1978?

I am glad that I only found out Scotland had actually qualified for next year’s Euros by seeing a Twitter meme of our national goalkeeper, wondering if it was OK to celebrate his crucial save at a penalty shoot-out. I’d ducked out of the actual ordeal of watching. Desperate shouts of “C’MON SCOTLAND!!” standing for more, so much more than the prevention of some faltering pass-back? No, the opposite is blessedly preferable.

THE most interesting concept in the commentary about the Super League was about the lack of “jeopardy” the plan implied. Its fixed castlist of teams, and their protection from relegation, reduced the elemental thrill of football as a game: ahead of the whistle, you really don’t know who will win or lose.

It’s hilarious how incomprehensible the Super League’s money men found this. “A manager makes a three-year plan but he can have a difference of several hundred million euros depending on his results”, said the Super League’s general secretary Anas Laghari. Imagine that! What a variable! It must be minimised.

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But as the football pundit (and professional philosopher) Stephen Mumford writes, “if you want beauty in football, you should play to win”. This is what makes all the individual tricks, the team stratagems, the free-kick set-pieces, the crosses and passing moves worth executing. Two teams straining themselves to vanquish the other produces all the delights we love about football.

The idea that you reduce the consequences of winning or losing, in order to ensure a return on corporate investment, seems to have hit a central nerve in the body politic of the game.

As the Gooners and Bhoys around me groan and cheer involuntarily at the triumphs and pratfalls of their sides’ fortunes, I sometimes miss those old tribal fitba thrills (but not the pains). I am, however, happy in my current equanimity.

Nearly any contest will do for me, from any part of the world. Each match a singular event, made from talents and rules, strategy and chance, never to be repeated. What bodies can do with a ball; what my body dimly remembers dreaming it could do.

Intrinsically, it’s always the Beautiful Game. This week, many of us remembered that.