"Some people think football is a matter of life or death. I'm disappointed by that attitude. I can assure you it's much more important than that." — Bill Shankly

In an interview with Les Inrocks a few years ago, the excellent Jean-Claude Michéa observed that "Contempt for football is a sign of genuine intellectual infirmity!" While I initially found the statement a bit too abrupt, the more I reflect on football, its artistic dimension, its drama, its romantic and tragic stories, its heroes sometimes worthy of mythology (think of the Herculean exploits of the immense Sadio Mané), the more I tend to believe he was fundamentally right. Football is undoubtedly one of humanity's greatest inventions, which is why it unites so many souls in stadiums and in front of television screens.

I always await the opening of the next World Cup with the same childlike excitement. Even though I regret the gradual disappearance of true "number 10s," football still has, and always will have, players from Messi to Max Dowman who will continue to write its most beautiful chapters.

But the football we love, whose commercial aspect has somewhat tarnished its original beauty, is now threatened by a deadly menace, the main virus of which is the elite who run it. A spectacular illustration of this was the recent decision by the appeals committee of the Confederation of African Football to declare Morocco the winner of the Africa Cup of Nations by default.

A bizarre decision from a purely legal standpoint, based on the rules that govern it, but also — more importantly — against common sense, which dictates that a match, a continental final no less, whose result has been validated on the field, despite the well-known twists and turns, cannot be invalidated two months later by an obscure jury of white-collar bureaucrats locked in an office.

Beyond this absurd decision, football more generally is threatened by this wave of reformism driven by current leaders, and first and foremost, FIFA President Gianni Infantino. The introduction of VAR was a disastrous decision that created more problems than it solved (as evidenced by the Senegal-Morocco match). It also contributed to slowly killing the tragic dimension of this sport that we were discussing earlier. We were all captivated by the goal unjustly disallowed for Germany against England at the 1966 World Cup, the story of Maradona's "Hand of God," or Lampard's shot against Germany in 2010—a fitting turn of events forty years later—and many other anecdotes that have contributed to the golden age of football. With VAR and goal-line technology, I fear we will no longer have any stories to tell our sons and grandsons.

Michel Platini — we will never regret enough that he did not become President of FIFA — had warned against the perverse effects of this technological “advance”, but mired in legal scandals, he was unable to put a stop to this reformist madness.

Today, Infantino and his cronies, with the regrettable complicity of football figures such as Arsène Wenger and Marco van Basten, have no intention of stopping now. They plan to change the offside rule to favor the attacker at the expense of tactical balance, while seriously considering introducing temporary exclusions or moving penalties that would definitively disrupt the flow of the game.

Ultimately, what awaits football is the fate of the NBA, where increasingly intrusive "innovations" have ended up sanitizing the game and alienating it from its fans. The NBA is currently suffering from a genuine popularity problem in the United States, with steadily declining viewership, because its promoters have forgotten that basketball is a sport before it is a spectacle or a consumer product.

This is a lesson to ponder for football leaders because, as Ernesto Laclau pointed out, football is the place par excellence where the passion of the crowds is expressed, this popular force that escapes any attempt at bureaucratic rationalization.