SPORT: Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague By Marc Perelman Verso, 128pp. £8.99

HALFWAY THROUGH Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague you can’t help wondering if the author is engaged in a prank. Does he really believe that sport is “totalitarian” and “a world power without equivalent”, that athletes are “basically sadomasochistic” and that the “predominant setting for violence in society is the stadium”? Apparently so.

Marc Perelman is an architect and professor of aesthetics at a Paris university, and his treatise follows a left-wing tradition of critiquing sport. Where Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco have tackled the subject with some artistry, however, Perelman is as subtle as a rookie playing 18 holes of golf with a shovel. (Something, no doubt, every self-respecting Marxist should do.)

Football exudes racism “from every pore”, fandom is for “people who can never live fulfilling lives” and the French rugby team’s annual underwear calendar represents “fantasised neo-fascist carnality”.

This scattergun approach inevitably results in the odd bullseye. He highlights the way the yearly news cycle is now greatly influenced by the sporting calendar and laments the way supporting a team has evolved into a “civic duty”.

He draws attention to the consequences of early specialisation, suggesting that Chinese Olympic nurseries, with their brutalising training regimes, allied with doping, embody the future of competitive sport. And he points out, with some regret, “where it had to be coerced in the past, the youth has rallied massively to the new sporting enterprise of its own free will”. (It’s true: in my day, having a sick note to avoid PE was a coup.)

There is an amusing, and very French, discussion about sport’s erotic codes, which “correspond to performance, violence, struggle and the most trivial bodily release”. In one of many “Whoa! Hold up there!” moments, he writes: “One of the more visible features of competitive sport has been the development of latent homosexual comportments among players in the same team, based on sadomasochistic conclusion (aggressiveness and ‘pleasure’ in pain) or group narcissism (We are the champions!).”

The underlying message of the book is that sport has “become the grandiose project of a projectless society”, but the real meat of it is an attack on stadiums, which Perelman believes facilitate the showcasing of the worst of human nature.

“In the geometrical perfection of the stadium, communicated and amplified by the surging mass of the crowd, a range of impulses is ‘released’; aggression, hatred, murderous sadism, underlining the effect of bringing individuals together while subjecting them to a brutal desublimation of their senses.”

Stadiums are “dark space, empty of values” and, above all, have nothing to do with play, “a disinterested activity without material goals, ludic and free”.

Perelman alludes to the impact of these buildings on their natural environment, with reference in particular to the last Olympics, in Beijing – blamed for destroying the “generally low profile of the historic city”.

Corroborating detail is sketchy. He argues, for example, that stadiums have “their backs turned to the city”, which might have been said of that other socialist’s pipe dream, the Bertie Bowl, but what of Croke Park or the venue formerly known as Lansdowne Road?

Moreover, the “anti-vernacular” and “inward-looking” aesthetic of stadiums might not appeal to the author, but architectural opinions differ. (Just which direction does he expect spectators to be facing: outwards?) It’s worth noting that the redeveloped Thomond Park in Limerick was voted Ireland’s favourite new building in an architecture competition in 2009, and 30,000 Munster fans can’t be wrong, can they?

The narrative is laced with references to the “liberal-capitalist system” and the “lumpenproletariat” (rough translation: couch potatoes), while the tone is closer to politburo than punditry, right up to the book’s dictatorial exit line: “There should be no sport.”

You won’t find José Mourinho, Bill Shankly or even Eric Cantona quoted here. Instead it’s all Jean Baudrillard and Marx (naturally), along with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Dunphy and Giles of postwar cultural criticism.

It’s not quite clear where Perelman’s loathing of sport originated – you suspect some jocks years ago may have kicked a sandcastle in the future architect’s face – but he gives a clue towards the end of the book when he cites Horkheimer approvingly: “The task of critical theory was to express what is not, as a rule, expressed.”

By his own admission, Perelman’s critique “has no positive side”, and like all fundamentalists he reserves particular scorn for moderates, those who seek to reform sport rather than abolish it.

By refusing even to contemplate arguments in defence of sport, however, his essay appears contrived at times and will struggle to persuade an audience beyond the most ideologically blinkered members of the militant left.

Joe Humphreys is an Irish Times journalist and author of Foul Play: What’s Wrong with Sport (Icon Books)