England is considered the motherland of football," said the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, this week. It's a common enough observation, but there are implications. If England is indeed the motherland, the English are the parents. And as parents, based on its behaviour in recent weeks, it falls upon us to smack it on the bottom, tell it that it's been a very bad sport indeed and send it to sit on the naughty step.

Parenting isn't easy. It is not enough simply to give birth to something and spend the rest of your existence sighing and cooing over it. This won't come as news to those who have parental responsibility for actual children, who all know that for every irresistible swelling of pride you'll probably have to mop up two wees and spend 25 minutes scrubbing crayon off the inside of the kettle. When it comes to looking after children the rules are simple: you created it, you clean up after it. Well, we created football, and we've got a lot of cleaning up to do.

For a long time the only regret we had about our role in the birth of the greatest sport ever was that we failed to make it inherently weighted towards British success, perhaps by somehow involving orderly queueing or the repeated viewing of a Morecambe & Wise Christmas Special. But it has recently become apparent that football isn't the greatest sport at all. Worse, it wasn't any good in the first place.

It turns out that football is only enjoyable when most people are no good at it. We enjoy watching brilliant wingers mesmerise outclassed full-backs. We applaud great sides as they destroy inferior rivals. We adore useless no-hopers who somehow conjure shock wins over massively superior opponents despite manifest technical failings. We are mildly entertained as two top teams tap away at the granite hunks of their defences before finally finding a faultline and merrily skipping through it. We embrace the greatest players, but we like them a lot more when they have a drink problem, require anger-management counselling and have a way with the ladies. It isn't the football that we love so much as the flaws – all football did was help us see them.

Over time, teams sought to become less imperfect – which was fine, admirable even, and we found that football was more good when those involved were less bad – but, and this is crucial, only up to a point. Now there is a team with almost no faults, and they are no fun at all. The new world champions are almost error-free, but against decent opponents Spain disappear into a world of flawless but joyless technical showmanship, like that bloke with an alto sax you saw once when the bar you were in turned out to be hosting an open-mic jazz improv evening. Once you have spent a while marvelling over each player's ability to accept a ball from a team-mate and shuffle it off to another one, there is very little left to love. This is not a complaint about Spain, who are merely the first to achieve what everyone has attempted. It is a problem with the sport itself. This is what football is, when played without faults: all technique and no mystique.

Spain's opponents behave like escapologists stuck in a flawless, airless glass box: first they seek a simple way out, for they are trained to believe that there is always a simple way out; then they try to break the walls open by throwing themselves into them or kicking them really, really hard. Once that has failed they start complaining loudly to anyone who will listen and might be able to help. Finally, they die of suffocation.

By taking football to hitherto unexplored peaks of perfection, the Spanish have ruined it for all of us. Imagine if everyone were as good as them – nothing genuinely interesting would ever happen. It's not just the players, either – soon we'll have goalline technology and video replays, and not even the referees will make mistakes.

So flawed is football that England contrived to go to the World Cup, get humiliated in three games, narrowly beat Slovenia in the other and still come out with an improved world ranking. Even the numbers are nonsense.

So, over to us. Britain is the motherland of football, and what's more it's the motherland of cricket, rugby and pooh sticks too. It should be no trouble for master sport-creators such as ourselves to knock something up that's better than useless old football. Horribly, however, this is another ability that has deserted us. So far as I can tell only one new sport has been invented in Britain in recent years and gone on to achieve even a modicum of popular success, and that involved people riding on broomsticks after a golden snitch and relied fairly heavily on being fictional.

No, we've got no choice but to rehabilitate the ones we already made up. So put on your sternest faces, it's all about to kick off. Football's coming home – and when it gets here, it's totally grounded.

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