This week Tony Adams guest-edited Radio Four's breakfast news show, the Today programme, perhaps the most surprising piece of left-field casting since Adams briefly guest-managed Portsmouth and, before that, briefly guest-relegated Wycombe Wanderers. He did quite a good job of it. Or at least that was the immediate impression, ahead of any possible whispers later this year about the Today programme lurching into administration, the Today programme being linked to a panic-stricken buyout by a secretive Middle East consortium, or the Today programme attempting to buy Younes Kaboul, while also selling Younes Kaboul, and simultaneously loaning Younes Kaboul back to itself.

The most interesting thing on the programme was an interview with Joey Barton, in which he said: "Most footballers are knobs." This kind of statement often passes without comment, but coming from an actual footballer it seems more resonant. You can even imagine Barton saying it, perhaps while wearing a pastel-coloured roll-neck sweater and sitting in a circle with a group of nodding, frowning men who keep urging him to "just be Joey" and saying things like "inside this room we're all naked".

But is it true? Probably not, given that as a generalisation it makes as much sense as announcing that most junior curates are knobs, or most assistant sales managers in a regional chain of ceramic hob installers are knobs, or most of those strangely wizened, disappointed-looking young men who appear on your doorstep trying to sell you dishcloths and garden gloves from a plastic box. The likelihood is that this is an example of knob-solipsism. Most footballers look like knobs to Barton because he has, for some time, been viewing the world through knob-coloured spectacles, seeing only a landscape coloured in broad, bold strokes of knob, waking up to find his eyes encrusted with small, gritty crystals of knob, stumbling out into a world fretted and woven with knob, through which he knob-waddles in knob-stitched shoes, drawing his knob-muffler close to his chest against a chill wind that tastes, inexplicably, of knob.

Having said that, Barton is an articulate speaker and did justify his comments about footballers by saying: "They are so detached from real life it's untrue." This hints at something I've suspected for some time: that footballers do feel detached and alienated, which has in turn made them suspect that they may, in fact, be knobs. This sense of detachment perhaps explains the recent trend for players to celebrate scoring by running behind the goal and instigating a head-fondling embrace with members of the crowd, while stewards in yellow coats don't just run, but sprint across to break it up, as though what they're witnessing isn't simply men hugging, but a kitten being Stanley-knifed, or the Queen being jostled by a group of youths. I've often wondered if anything is said, or urgently muttered, during these cuddles, which last up to 15 seconds. Maybe just things like "I'm not a knob".

I also suspect Barton of making a wider point. This is a man who has for some time been vilified as a kind of Premier League Satan. And just as the devil is a convenient repository for all evil, a species-wide scapegoat, so Barton has been handy shorthand for football knobbery in all its forms.

By saying most footballers are knobs he is refuting this using the voice of atheistic enlightenment, which says there is no absolute evil, that knobbery is in all of us; the devil, and "Joey Barton", are no more than devices to excuse sustained analysis. Then again, maybe that's a discussion best left for the next time Nigel Winterburn guest-edits In Our Time.