I’ve always liked Will Self, one-time literary enfant terrible, TV talking head and all-round perspicacious hypersesquipedalianist. I know it’s probably not alright to like Will Self any more. He’s almost certainly not cool. It’s likely he’s said things on Twitter I can’t be bothered to Google that have angered people or displayed incorrect ways of thinking, sparking one of those wild sprawling waves of self-nourishing social media rage, the smartphone generation’s equivalent of going to a massive rave in a field.

I still like Will Self, though. Not so much the recent Will Self, who has wise, weary opinions about politics. But old Will Self from the 1990s who, in a strange time of plastic prosperity and glossy consensus, when everyone seemed happy to be brayingly cool and British and pleased with themselves, still managed to be wild and censorious about everything in a way that looking back now seems about right. That was a great Will Self. I don’t want him to do podcasts and have opinions about Trident. I want him to smoke crack on Newsnight and tell Evan Davis he’s a refulgent ganglion of the news‑argument ziggurat, or do poppers and kidnap Nigel Farage as part of an art happening.

Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend Read more

All of which brings us naturally on to Chris Sutton, fellow curmudgeon and all-round speaker of nostril-quivering truth, who is right now the hottest football pundit on TV. Sutton was everywhere this week. He’s everywhere most weeks, the most distinctive, excitingly vinegary voice in football’s massed commentariat.

The Sutton Supremacy has come in a rush. It has been a takeover by stealth for a pundit who until this season was another background voice, honing his craft in the backwaters of BT Sport’s SPL coverage. An excellent and underrated player in his time but otherwise just another presence around the plinth holding a mic and frowning respectfully while Steve McManaman says something about game awareness or going beyond the last man.

No longer. Sutton is everywhere now, and so absorbingly astringent on every topic it’s hard to imagine how we all managed to carry on with our everyday lives before he started popping up calling everything pathetic and abject and embarrassing. It is a familiar process now, a degree of fluent, unself-conscious disdain that leaves you nodding impatiently through the other stuff about moving the ball quicker and building the team around what Wayne can still do, just waiting for the moment the presenter finally says: “Chris. Thoughts?”

Cue Sutton, sucking his cheeks in, a man with the curt, brutishly disappointed look of a Cambridge-educated assistant games master who once played hockey for England but now finds himself reduced to disciplining adolescents for acts of depravity in the junior boarding house. Sutton pauses. He looks bored, sad, nobly demeaned. Finally in a strangled voice he says: “Abject.” Or maybe: “Woeful.” Or: “Desperate, Gary.” Dismal. Entropic. Wearisome. Inauspicious. Degenerate. Unpropitious. I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither. Chris Sutton, thanks for that.

This kind of cinematic miserablism isn’t a new thing. Jimmy Hill made his name as a nay-sayer and nit-picker right back at the start of all this. Alan Hansen was thrillingly dismissive in his own glory days, the drunken vampire years when the idea of someone lolling back on a pouffy sofa and saying “unbelievable” still seemed quite bracing and punk. Roy Keane does a fine line now in violently curdled fury.

I also like Craig Burley who, like Sutton, appears to feel himself besieged on all sides by wickedness and mediocrity, growling into the camera with uncontained rage, like the owner of a successful firm of city centre bailiffs explaining in sarcastic, hate-filled detail the relevant provisions of the Tribunals Courts and Enforcement Act as he backs you up against the living room wall, knuckles tightening around the cosh in his right hand.

The best thing about Sutton is he’s completely natural with it. This is not an act or a persona, to the extent we must assume he’s spent the last 15 years of relative obscurity sitting around at home looking magisterially pained, or saying things like “woeful” and “abject” as he trails around the shops on a Saturday afternoon.

And really, authenticity seems to be the point here. Punditry itself is ludicrously prominent these days, a function of a sport that simply never stops, that must happen all the time even when it’s not really happening at all. Football is more than ever an assault on the emotions, yanking at your arm, making demands, jangling away at your finer feelings.

This is a drowned world, a place where even small-fry corruption has become an arm of the entertainment, where an England manager en route to Qatar and Russia is derailed for the crime of simply reflecting the curdled culture from which he was plucked. And where the brilliance of the spectacle, the basic pleasure of gawping at these impossibly bright lights comes with a constant drip of confusion and compromise.

It is only natural to crave a corrective voice in this nepotism of nastiness, a razor to cut the fluff. During the great military parades in ancient Rome, victorious generals would have a slave posted next to them to whisper about their failings and say things like “remember, you are just a man”. Hail the sofa curmudgeon. Abject. Desperate. Hapless. Woeful. Yes. Yes, more. More of this.