As someone who has never played the game of football to the highest level, I wonder if I dare even giggle at Gary Neville? The hierarchies of English football and the various industries that surround it – including Her Majesty’s sports press – frequently remind me of some failing post-war minor British public school, where bumptious members of the Remove are always being slapped down by the bigger boys, for reasons as bygone as the empire. Pointless rules, desiccated conventions, rigid systems of deference – what is any of it for, except propping up the establishment for the same reason establishments always demand propping up?

Hang on, where on earth was I? Ah, yes. Gary Neville, prefect of punditry over at Sky Sports. In the course of a wide-ranging interview last week, the malfunctioning Liverpool keeper Loris Karius, 23, had the mildest of digs at Neville, 41, from whom he has absorbed at least his fair share of unsparing criticism.

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In retaliation, Neville took to social media to post a newspaper report of some of his co-pundit Jamie Carragher’s disparaging comments about the young keeper. Appended to it was a message of acid charm: “My sincere apologies Karius. You’re right. A failed manager hasn’t a clue. I won’t copy your great fan, pundit and club legend again.”

Oh, Gary! I am enjoying the revelation that you “copy” Carragher, a detail which casts you as the Shearer to his Hansen. But honestly, slapping down people in this fashion displays a level of insecurity normally found only in presidents-elect.

In a football context, this is the sort of nuclear affront we saw when Frank Lampard reacted to some Joey Barton impudence by declaring: “I don’t think Joey should even talk about me and Steven Gerrard. That probably says enough.” It did, if not in a good way.

“Timing wrong,” Neville later ruled in one of several further digressions on the Karius interview, oddly judging that it’s not at all interesting for fans to hear about athletes for whom things are going wrong as well as right. “However if he’s going to do it his press adviser should have told him to stay clear of this situation.”

Wait – a publicist should have told Karius to steer clear of a situation in which he might have a momentary pop at Gary Neville? I think the world has too many of those sort of publicists already, and I’m rather sorry that Gary – whose analysis I otherwise really admire – doesn’t share this view.

Were that not enough, Gary’s brother Phil weighed in to tell Karius that at his vintage “you say nothing to no one” and “keep your mouth shut”, a piece of tag-teaming which drew an amusing response from Chris Sutton. “What are Phil’s criteria when players should be allowed to speak? Does that mean no one from the lower leagues is allowed, or do you have to have 50 caps, 100 caps, do you have to win the Premier League?” Of Gary and Phil, he mused: “They’re like the Mitchell brothers, aren’t they?”

Naughty Chris. This is the most outrageous bit of Neville-mocking since Jaap Stam called the brothers “busy cunts”. Finally, in case Karius was still under any misapprehension about his place in the universe, Carragher also weighed in, telling Karius to “shut up and do your job”.

Oh dear. I’m pretty sure I’ve done it myself a few times over the years, but the older I get, the more horribly wrong I think I was. Telling people to pipe down does no one any favours (and not just because in my line of work, it’s good for business).

On the most basic level, we hear too little from players as it is. The chief complaint of writers and readers of the sports pages over the past few decades has been the problem of access to the athletes.

As sports have become bigger and more lucrative, higher and higher walls have been put between those who play them and those who watch and love them. Anodyne post-match interviews don’t count.

I would almost always like to hear more from athletes, particularly those with the courage to speak candidly, whether or not I might end up agreeing with their opinions. Why shouldn’t people speak freely, even – perhaps especially – if they’re having a shitter of a season? The Mail journalist who conducted the offending interview with Karius said afterwards it had been set up before his latest unfortunate game, and he had naturally assumed the player’s people would cancel it. All credit to Karius for fronting up – though I can’t imagine the next person will bother.

On a deeper level, I find that repeated command to “shut up and play” particularly uncomfortable. As the radical US sportswriter Dave Zirin has pointed out on so many occasions down the years, the put-down is associated with silencing athletes – mainly black ones, in the States – who dare to speak out of turn.

That this sledgehammer should have been deployed to put a lid on Karius – whose only crime was to reflect defensively on a horrid season that we’ve all been able to watch – serves as a reminder that even the titchiest challenge to established ways of doing things is regarded as a threat in football. It must be, or why would Neville and Carragher give a toss about it?

The more we see them at work, the more it should be clear that many of football’s established hierarchies and omertas are bullshit or worse. Either they are enemies to progress, as in the case of the FA, five of whose former chief or senior executives this week called for the outside imposition of reform. Or they are hierarchies which can be co-opted into infinitely darker schemes, as the emerging scale and dynamics of child sexual abuse in the game is showing.

Obviously, older former players may well be wiser than younger current ones. You’d certainly hope so. Things might have been different in their day – but that doesn’t mean they were always better. Let players say what they like, be glad when they do, and encourage far more of it than is currently dared. The game and its grandees should be big enough to take it.