I love football, but our national sport is being dragged further into the gutter week by week – and I don’t blame the multi-millionaire brats playing the game.

And, I know soccer is so sacred, not to mention a multibillion-pound business, no one ever wants to risk making a change or, heaven forbid, do anything which might upset its precious players.

But the pace at which the sport evolves, or more accurately doesn’t evolve, is unbelievable and, as a result, it continues to stagnate.

A year ago in this column, during the Six Nations, I compared and contrasted a gentleman’s game played by hooligans and a game for hooligans played by gentlemen.

The difference in the way rugby respects its referees, yet football demeans and abuses its officials, is as stark now as it was 12 months ago.

I said then football should introduce a sin bin system, at all levels, with immediate effect and introduce a zero tolerance policy towards referees being abused.

A blue card system, where offending players are sin-binned for 10 minutes, has been trialled at lower levels and proved remarkably successful.

A fact the secretary of the International Football Association Board (the group responsible for football’s rules), Lukas Brud, accepts, but despite this he says a decision to trial it at the top level of the game, or not, is something they plan to ‘discuss over the next couple of years’, suggesting it might be introduced in ‘a decade or so’.

How can anyone justify discussing anything so simple and straightforward for years?

“The difference in the way rugby respects its referees, yet football demeans and abuses its officials, is as stark now as it was 12 months ago...”

The reason of course is simple – cash continues to flood into football like a crazed tsunami so it’s much easier for its barmy burghers to bury their heads in the sand while the bank balances continue to build.

Apart from these, perhaps understandable, financial concerns, worse still is a fear of upsetting the premier participants. Idiotic football pundits have not been slow to slam the very thought of a blue card, despite the fact they would only be issued for cynical fouls or abuse of officials. Presumably, they’re happy for refs to continue to be abused?

Paradoxically they have cited players’ current cheating behaviour as the main reason for not bringing in the system. Paul Merson reckons sin binning will result in time wasting in an effort to grind down the clock. So, you let players ruin the game with so-called ‘professional fouls’ just because you’re too worried to penalise them in case they go on to break further rules by timewasting – utter madness.

Barmy Brud says they need to find a way to retain and motivate refs as (surprise, surprise) fewer new officials are signing up. He claims poor player behaviour, time-wasting and consistency are IFAB’s priorities.

It’s obviously working well as only 15 of the 20 Premier League clubs were fined at least once for failing to control their players last season.

I say introduce a new card immediately, though any colour would work equally well - whether that’s blue, green, pink, white or black.