In a cleverly crafted piece on the rise and fall of sporting empires, institutions and individuals, Simon Barnes, writing in The Times 22/10/10 shows why he is light years ahead of the rest of the journalistic pack, with only fellow Times correspondent, Matt Syed, able to match him for depth and dimension. True, The Guardian has excellent investigative journalists with the likes of David Conn and Owen Gibson, but neither seem to have that ability to touch on the soft human underbelly of sport in the way that Barnes regularly achieves.

Yes, sport has become a big nasty industry with all that goes with it; yes it is the new opiate of the masses; and yes it is extremely extravagant in the face of local and global poverty. But sport is still more than that. It has something of the essential human condition that so many sports journalists seem to miss. Not so Mr Barnes.

I am loath to comment at all on Barnes’ latest piece it stands perfectly well on its own. But a true blogist just cannot resist a little dig, a little light criticism, even when none is really required. It’s in the nature of the blogosphere that comment be made.

Having more than adequately outlined how even such great sporting giants as West Indian and Aussie cricket and, dare we say it, Liverpool and Manchester United football clubs, are each capable of decline and demise, Barnes throws up his hands in true agonistic bewilderment and admits to no real knowledge of what leads to such inevitability. Instead he offers his readers a shopping list of likely causes and then adds that all are contributing factors. The reader is free to choose their own reasons, some more central than others. It’s a pick and mix approach. Let’s read what Barnes has to say on the inevitable rise and fall of all things sporting, indeed all things human.

The reality is that every great institution declines in the end. Again, you can choose your reason; that ultimate failure is the natural state of fallen humanity that it is the chastisement of hubris, that the bastards always grind you down in the end. Sport reveals a truth: that however good something is, something always spoils it. You can blame whoever or whatever you like God, the Americans, the Indians, the English, Russian billionaires, Gary Pratt, Kevin Pietersen, Ronaldo, prawn sandwich eaters, the press, failures of leadership, the aging process of the human body, mortality itself. And you would be right. That’s because every decline has any number of proximate causes but the ultimate cause is always there right at the beginning. That is because decline is an ineluctable aspect of greatness. You simply cannot have greatness without decline.. Decline is part of greatness. To every empire its Suez.

I challenge the world’s sporting journalists to come up with a better philosophical summation of sport. Yet there is a flaw. Decline is not in the hands of the gods, nor is it a smorgasbord of equally valid factors. Decline has a scientific basis and the job of journalists as much as social-scientists is to seek out the primary from the secondary. There can be little doubt that subjective factors like individual personalities come into play, no less in the sporting world than in the political world. But to place the subjective over and above the long festering objective conditions is to suggest that Joseph Stalin’s personality defects were the principal cause of the demise of the Soviet Union. That would be a popular nonsense.

Similarly, to attribute the potential decline of Manchester United or Liverpool FC to the human failures of its respective managers or players would be to downplay the central nature of capitalist club ownership in the EPL and the increasing pattern of levering huge debt onto once financially robust community sporting institutions.

Barnes is right to attribute a host of interconnecting factors to the process of decline but these factors are not of equal importance. The global economic ones are increasingly paramount. There should be no agnosticism on this point.