“Cricket is not simply consumed,” Gideon Haigh said at the height of the ball tampering scandal. “It’s nurtured.” The perils of treating sport like a brand and a mass entertainment industry is a recurring theme in his work. “The weird cult of ‘fans first’,” he writes, “is actually shorthand for ‘consumers first’.”

The AFL is not a sport. It’s a brand. And 2018 has been a rotten year for the brand. Women’s football been further marginalised. Grass roots football is increasingly impoverished. The score review system is a fiasco. The Gold Coast experiment is a black hole. Rule changes are afoot, but there’s little consensus on what should be done. Last year’s No 2 draft pick is currently eating through a straw.

George Megalogenis’ book, The Football Solution, looks beyond the vicissitudes of a footy season, beyond the prattle, the tinkering, the brand. The book examines the role Australian rules football has played in both boom and bust, the way, however clumsily, it has bridged the divides of class, religion and ethnicity. A former political reporter and data nerd, he shows how football has evolved with and often bucked the politics of its day, how it’s inextricably linked with the shifting nature of work, technology and demography.

Megalogenis is a Richmond man, which is always a worry. The Richmond Football Club, he argues, is better run than the country. Our political parties are in thrall to polls and sack leaders at the drop of a hat, the way footy clubs once did. Political reporting increasingly resembles a footy tipping competition. “Like the football coaches of old,” he writes, “leaders are reduced to the equivalent of yelling at voters to respect their authority.”

Richmond’s 2017 premiership, he contends “contained the very elements of leadership and community that are missing in our politics today – power exercised without ego, a united team, a dash of charisma and a committed supporter base.” Football, he says, has achieved what politics no longer aspires to - “an ideal democratic space”.

It’s a tantalising thesis but it’s something of a stretch. A counter argument can be mounted that Richmond, like most other clubs, is propped up by pokie money, that it ruthlessly cuts those who aren’t up to the grade, and that it capitalised on its home ground advantage, a healthy list and a handful of generational players to ride the September wave.

Still, Richmond can teach us a thing or two. It is run by a woman. Its best players on grand final day were a Maori, a Muslim Australian, a Jehovah’s Witness, an Indigenous Australian and an Italian Australian. Both Richmond and the Western Bulldogs exhibited what Robert Murphy calls “a new kind of masculinity, a tenderness and affection we haven’t seen before in our game”.

Footy was very different when young George caught the bug. His Greek dad lobbed in a Richmond of sly grog shops, slums and street ruffians. For his son, footy was plastic balls, woollen yellow and black jumpers in school photos and recess games on asphalt. It was how he memorised his six times-tables. He listened to grand finals perched halfway up a maple tree. His family didn’t eat out, go to the beach or drive to the country. Football was “day release from the house arrest of migrant life”. His dad ordered he and his sister to stand in the dry area at the MCG, close to the mounted police. “The sonic boom that greeted a Richmond goal was life affirming,” he remembers. Footy was particularly violent in the 1970s. On and off the field, Richmond was a brute, a rule bender, an irresistible force. For children of the 70s, “the game simultaneously extended our innocence and prepared us for the cynicism of adulthood”.

Dustin Martin thanks Tigers fans after the 2017 preliminary final against the GWS Giants at the MCG. Photograph: Adam Trafford/AFL Media/Getty Images

Later, as a university student, footy was relegated. During the 1982 finals series, he worked as a cleaner at a suburban cinema. Rocky 3 was the most popular movie. Its soundtrack was Eye of the Tiger. As Clubber Lang pulverised Rocky Balboa, Carlton’s mosquito fleet ran the Tigers off their feet. Rocky got a new trainer and a rematch. Richmond got 35 years of ineptitude and calamity. But the supporters keep coming back. The wretchedness of the whole thing stuck in the marrow.

Their salvation seemingly came from nowhere. For Megalogenis, like many Richmond supporters, the standout was the preliminary final. It was probably the most one-sided crowd in Australian sporting history. And it was loud. One was reminded of Martin Amis’ description of another crowd from another code – “a wraparound millipede of rage and yearning, with the body heat of 180,000 torched armpits, with its ear-hurting roars, and that incensed whistling, like a billion babies joined in one desperate scream”. When Dan Butler goaled in the final quarter, the noise, Megalogenis notes with a certain pride, was measured at 126 decibels, louder than a jet engine.

“I detect an urgency in the preoccupation with football now,” he writes. But why? Why does it suddenly seem to matter more? Why were there lunatics dancing on bonnets on Swan St? Why were there people at grave sites with transistor radios? Why did half the adult population of Australia watch the grand final? And why, despite all our frustrations with the game, are we turning up and signing up in record numbers?

These are anxious times. Increasingly, we’re losing faith in our institutions – the church, the parliament, the media, the banks, the judiciary. The public debate on anything that vaguely matters, whether it’s race, gender or national identity, is mind-rotting. We lose our shit over plastic bags at supermarkets. We have fascist carpenters masquerading as political pundits.

Meanwhile, fewer and fewer of us actually feel part of something. David Goldblatt covered similar territory to Megalogenis in his suburb study of English football. He writes of our “longing for the communal and the public in an individualised and privatised world”. “In a secular world,” he writes, “we need shared energies and identities.”

Sometimes, I think football’s cultural sway is overplayed. Sometimes, I’m embarrassed by the way it renders me a fully-fledged imbecile for a couple of hours each week. I think footy’s real charms lie at the local level. But it’s always there – an anchor of sorts, a winter ritual, a reference point, a conversation starter. For me, footy is the gravitational draw of the MCG, a place, Haigh once wrote, that offers the “perfect balance of solitude and companionship”. It’s the smell of September. It’s the players who can make your brain yelp. It’s Don DeLillo’s “longing on a large scale”.

But when you over-regulate and over-analyse anything, Megalogenis stresses, you end up destroying it. Australian football is more than a brand. It’s more than a money spinner. And we’re more than consumers. Football may not be the solution but it’s replete with stories like George Megalogenis’, and it’s something we have to nurture and protect.