Football’s coming home? It never went away. The return of the Premier League on Friday night with Leicester City’s visit to Manchester United suggests we have become so hooked on football that we can’t do without it for more than a few minutes. Can it really be starting less than a month after the French teenage prodigy Kylian Mbappé broke Croatian hearts, won the World Cup and drove the Champs Elysées faithful into ecstasy and ancillary looting? Yes it can. Will his teammate Paul Pogba be able to free himself from the shackles of Manchester United manager José Mourinho’s constipated footballing philosophy long enough to demonstrate the midfield joie de vivre he showed in Moscow? Pretend you care.

I say “we” for a reason. This is not one of those articles in which someone disses the hoi polloi from Olympian heights. Rather, it’s what the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist philosophers called immanent critique, specifically one performed from within the spirit-crushing, intelligence-depleting nightmare that is the ugly game. For I am a football fan too.

Like millions of England supporters, I stood with my back to the telly clenching my fists during the Colombia penalty shootout. Later, I celebrated victory over Sweden in patriotic delirium by chucking out all the Ikea Allen keys I could find. I fell for the lie that 52 years of hurt was coming to a glorious end as England dreamed.

A few weeks later I’m back, dreaming stupidly, this time about Aston Villa, the football team I’ve supported since the 1970s when Andy Lochhead and Chico Hamilton were in their pomp. Gossip reaches me that glamorous French footballing icon Thierry Henry, fresh from his World Cup coaching role with Belgium, might be lured to Birmingham to replace broken-nosed, glamour-free zone Steve Bruce as manager.

Maybe Henry might sprinkle magic dust on a slumbering giant, transforming it into the Belgium of the Championship? Perhaps 36 years of hurt (the European Cup victory against Bayern Munich in Rotterdam in 1982 was the team’s last notable triumph) might come to an end?

No matter that the realisation of such a dream would yet again involve football legitimising management short-termism and employee disposability in an economy that, since the Thatcher years, has systematically destroyed workers’ rights to boost shareholder profits. No matter that I’m, yet again, deluding myself.

The sociologist Max Weber wrote of the iron cage of capitalism that subdued humans during working hours. Later, the Frankfurt School argued, capitalism got more sophisticated, deploying the culture industry (Hollywood, popular music, spectator sports, fashion) to control our leisure time, co-opting us to unconsciously facilitate the smooth running of a system that oppressed us. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, Marx argued. Football fans especially, he could have added.

Aston Villa striker Peter Withe scores the winning goal against Bayern Munich in the European Cup final in 1982. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

Our passion is both tool of the ruling class and safety valve for dupes who would better put their energies elsewhere. Leon Trotsky saw this clearly: “The revolution will inevitably awaken in the British working class the deepest passions which have been diverted along artificial channels with the aid of football.” You’ll notice that hasn’t happened. We were too busy gawping from the terraces and sofas to seize control of our destinies.

It isn’t the only sport that plays this role. “If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants,” British historian GM Trevelyan wrote, “their chateaux would never have been burnt.” Cricket kept us in our places (for example, even as Alan Bates almost won the village cricket match in the film version of The Go-Between, he remained the bit of tenant farmer rough for Julie Christie’s Lady Trimingham).

So football in particular and sport in general continue to relentlessly extend their remit, a universal religion with a paradise (victory), a hell (defeat), and splendid gods (athletes). It is today’s opium of the masses. Oh come on, you might counter. Surely we should take heart from the marvellous example of Gareth Southgate’s multiracial England team. Surely the poignant story behind Raheem Sterling’s gun tattoo (paying homage to his murdered dad) or Dele Alli’s stirring overcoming of his broken family shows that football can be inspiring. Arguably not: Sterling and Alli are exceptions that prove the rule; they encourage us to think that Britain is socially mobile rather than the truth that it is sclerotic, keeping the masses in their places – especially if you’re a black or mixed-race kid. In this respect as in many others, football encourages us to be complacent but we should struggle to overcome.

Sport, then, is a nightmare from which we dare not awake. For if we did, we would see it as the emblem of an intolerable world and burn our season tickets. On the other hand, hopefully Villa can replicate their stylish dismantling of Hull on Monday when they take on Wigan Athletic at Villa Park this weekend and impose themselves on the importunate rustics of Yeovil Town at Huish Park the following Tuesday. Fingers crossed!

• Stuart Jeffries is a feature writer for the Guardian

• This article was amended on 10 August 2018. Alan Bates almost won the village cricket match in The Go-Between, he did not win it as an earlier version said.

