I LOVE football … or more accurately, I used to love football. It was once one of the enduring attachments of my life, a passion that I thought could never weaken and never wane. As a child growing up, I lived in a bedroom known to the family as the fridge. It faced out to the Grampians and a lacerating wind blew down from the Highlands, bringing extremes of cold weather even in the late summer.

My bedroom had one redeeming feature: it looked down on the marshalling yards, to the north of Perth railway station, where goods trains and replacement passenger coaches were shunted and parked. The marshalling yards had industrial lights and they shone on seemingly endless night shifts and when they merged with the floodlights of St Johnstone’s old Murton Park stadium on a Wednesday night, it was as if a carpet of shimmering light covered the horizon. Such was the luminance that you could read a book long into the night under the escaped light of the marshalling yards.

Even when St Johnstone moved their ground to the all-seater stadium at

McDiarmid Park, on farmlands where I used to raid orchards and steal hardened unripe plums, I could still see the new ground from my bedroom window. It was as if this local football team was part of my life, and so it remained.

But something strange has happened in the past 10 years to partially erase those fond memories, as if sandpaper has coarsely rubbed away what was once magical about football.

I still have deep loyalties to both my club and to Scotland, whose adventures I cling to in the often-forlorn hope that we emerge from the torpor of the past 20 years. Those long-held loyalties remain, but something has happened to football and I struggle to feel the affinity for

the game that once coursed through my veins.

Last week, a row broke out among supporters, which only served to exaggerate my feelings of detachment. It was an almighty howl from the terraces demanding that the Scottish Government intervene to save football from financial ruin in the face of the pandemic. I found myself sitting on my hands unable to join the throng and unwilling to abandon intellect in the upsurge of raw emotions.

The dispute was about whether emergency funding should be made available to save clubs from extinction. It was a well intentioned debate but, like so much of modern football discourse, it was quickly strangled by club affiliation, by overemotionalism and by the monomania that seems to grip some fans when football comes under scrutiny.

The BBC Scotland sports journalist Tom English, currently a magnet for passing vitriol online, wrote last week: “If there is to be a Scottish Government financial ‘intervention’ into football then identify the clubs/grassroots most in peril and prioritise. Clubs currently recruiting players at the top end shouldn’t be all that high on any crisis list despite the public campaigning.”

For me it was a statement of the bleeding obvious, but it attracted reams of counterarguments, almost all of them loaded with bias and affiliation.

Scottish football is a woeful candidate for support from the public purse. For more than 20 years, I have argued that the cost-base of football is dreamily high and that successive clubs – including Gretna, Dundee, Livingston, Motherwell, Hearts and Rangers – have all financially imploded, laid low by some combination of fantasy economics, nefarious leadership and callous disregard for company law. Why any government would see this sector of industry as a deserving case baffles me.

Many argue that football is suffering because fans are currently not allowed to attend, and a vital source of income has evaporated. This is in part true, but it is a challenge shared by theatre, comedy, nightclubs and festivals, all of which can put forward a case that they face harsh times.

Unlike football, the live events industries cannot rely on television revenues. While fans cannot go to games the media can, and top-flight Scottish football brings in guaranteed income from television deals. Smaller clubs in the top flight will argue that television revenues are skewed towards Celtic and Rangers, but that was not a decision taken by the Scottish Government; it was a by-product of the league itself and the lopsided power that has accrued to the top two clubs and that other clubs have tolerated for their own ends.

FOOTBALL has changed. There was once a time when clubs had enough players to see out a season.Now managers talk about their squad-size, their “strength in depth” and the layers of talent emerging from sizeable youth academies. Then there are new innovations, data-science, dieticians, specialist coaches and regiments of physiotherapists.

I cannot think of another industry that has allowed its cost-base to balloon quite like football. But try to question the wisdom of some of this and you are met by the chumocracy, a battalion of former players that have colonised coaching, management and increasingly the media. They are a generation that knows how to spend but cannot calculate.

Even at the hight of the pandemic some clubs have persisted with spending on first-team signings while planning redundancies elsewhere in the business. It is not a good look in these troubled times.

Last week a new book was published, and it reminded me of what once ignited my love of football. Snapshot is a wonderful celebration of the heartlands of Scottish football. Written by Daniel Gray, with stunning photography by Alan McCredie, the book celebrates a “different kind of beauty” to be found in lower leagues, in amateur football and among community clubs across the land.

This is a world far removed from the upper echelons of the game, a place where roofs leak, social clubs cling on and first-team players know the fans by name. It is a sector of football easily mocked and frequently sneered at, but one that is much worthier of a handout than any Premiership club.

One image grabbed my imagination. It is a photograph of overgrown terracing at Glasgow’s Tinto Park, once home to Benburb FC. It shows a section of the ground behind a goal which has become encompassed by prairie, as if the football ground is being reclaimed by nature and by history as it recedes into fading memory.

The book helped me understand something about my own dilemma. For years I have wrongly described myself as a football fan, but the pandemic has seriously challenged that once-settled presumption. I have no contract to watch games on pay television. I am in no rush to see fans back at games, even though their presence has been shown to be vital. And I have no desire to see precious public money made available to football on the spurious basis that it is somehow superior to other forms of public entertainment.

Snapshot helped me understand that since childhood I have been a fan of communities and that my dedication to my club and country are in fact not about football in any intrinsic way, but a hard-wired connection to places I grew up and with people I know. When I take my seat at the back of the McDiarmid Park stand, I pass a season-ticket holder who nursed my mother in her dying days. I have an irreducible fondness for where I grew up and, for its unfashionable limitations. Most of all I respect the start in life it gave me. I love Scotland and feel excited about the next chapter in our story, too. All these things are rooted in community and in shared experience. Football can harvest those feelings, but only if it remains relevant to and rooted in communities.

To cling on to what I love I am willing to strike a deal with football, but I remain sceptical about how the game is run and the Faustian pact it has struck with television, with globalisation and with unrealistic spending.

Football in our top league has made an extremely poor case for public bail-outs in recent years and the game needs to finally understand that it must save itself.

Snapshot by Daniel Gray and Alan McCredie is published by Arena in partnership with Nutmeg magazine