New FA chairman Greg Dyke has outlined his vision for English football, declaring that the time has come to reassess the place of the sport in public life with football 'corrupt, bloated, dull, and ultimately pointless'.
'In our modern, media-saturated, club-dominated culture, many people have forgotten an important truth about the game,' Dyke writes. 'Namely, that when you really think about it, football has no point whatsoever. '
'It's not an art, it's not a science, it doesn't reveal any deeper truth about the human condition,' he told FourFourTwo.com. 'Our obsession with it borders on the demeaning.'
'When you get down to it,' he continued, 'It's just 22 people kicking a ball around and in recent years we've lost sight of that. It's time we put football back where it belongs: on the fringes of society's consciousness, alongside equally irrelevant pastimes like whittling and bingo.'
Dyke's vision represents a change of tack for the FA, who under previous regimes had insisted that football was a significant part of the fabric of English national culture.
'Anyone who tells you football is important is either trying to sell something, or they're mentally ill,' Dyke said.
'It's football, for crying out loud. Wouldn't time spent watching football be better spent going for a walk, or reading, or learning to play the harmonica? I think we'd all be much better off if we just took a step back for a minute and reassessed our life priorities.'
'Go outside,' he concluded. 'It's a lovely sunny day. Stop reading this and go outside right now.'
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