In 1998, France suffered a disaster: her national football team won the World Cup. This might seem like a needlessly provocative thing to say in a country that has been yearning for an identical disaster since 1966. But imagine, for a moment, the mass hysteria that would accompany such an achievement. It's hard enough to escape football as it is  every two years, the scant three-month breather from the sport we are given is interrupted by either a worldwide or a European competition  but how much more invaded we would be by images, still and moving, of a successful football team. It would induce psychosis. There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch that very deftly exposes the cretinous adoption of first person plural by proud football supporters, as if they had actually been on the pitch and contributed to victory. Were England to actually win something for once, an entire nation would be unhinged by collective narcissism. Meanwhile, we have an Olympics to endure  though this might have escaped your attention, so discreet and self-effacing has the publicity about it been.

Marc Perelman, a French intellectual scandalised by the way sport has dumbed down his peers ("de-intellectualised", as he puts it, which for an intellectual is presumably as bad as castration) has had enough:

 sport has risen to the level of a world power, an authority that tends to obscure, overhang and infuse all activities in a society ravaged by the disarray of mutilated individuals, without any collective project. Sport has established itself as the spearhead of an army in battle order, which crushes anyone who is stupefied by it. The steamroller of decadent modernity, sport flattens everything as it passes and becomes the sole project of a society without projects. (Emphasis Perelman's.)

Perelman is not, in this quote, exactly clear about what that army is, but it's not hard to work out: globalised capitalism, and for those who doubt that this is the case, all it is necessary to do is contemplate the way that at Olympic events this summer, the only beer you will be allowed to drink will be Heineken, the only food you will be allowed to eat McDonald's. May both their names live in infamy. This is a kind of nightmare capitalism, where, in pseudo-Darwinian fashion, ultimately only one brand survives. The grey monoculture of state communism, once the west's great fear, has been replaced by a gaudy monoculture.

This is the work of stirring polemic that all of us who were picked last for teams at school have been waiting for. Well, up to a point. Being a French intellectual, Perelman is prone to both the grand statement and the baffling statement (as well as the highly debatable statement, and the near-repetition of a statement for the sake of sonority, as in the paragraph quoted above), whose leper-bell for the robust English sceptic is the opening clause "in Hegelian terms " But that is the style over there, and as no one seems to be making a stand against the sporting culture (I use the world "culture" here, as Perelman does, with deliberate irony) over here, this will have to do.

For Perelman, the rot really set in with the 1936 Olympics, that parade of pomp and frightening precision which showcased the Nazi regime and more or less told the world what was going to kick off in three years' time. He makes much of the inherent links between propaganda and sport, and it is, I would say, impossible to refute such a thesis. The 1980 Moscow Olympics were also a showcase; as were the 2008 Beijing games, whose architectural mastermind, he reminds us, was one Albert Speer  yes, son and namesake of Hitler's favourite architect.

And the poison running through the veins of the Olympic body has its counterpart in the drugs running through the veins of its athletes. As well as the "normal" steroids, accepted at low doses by the World Anti-Doping Agency, we can look forward to such experimental exotica as secretagogues, vascular endothelial growth factor, hypoxia-inducible factor, and other tongue-twisters and muscle-enhancers. As Perelman puts it, in his italics, "Doping is not external to sport but has come to be its very basis."

And this is before we get to the way that sport demands from its spectators a withdrawal of intellection, a de-mentation, or the way that we are pulverised by sporting images both within and beamed from the stadia (buildings that, he reminds us, have their backs turned on the cities that surround them, although admittedly one would be hard-pressed to construct them differently; he misses a trick, though, when he doesn't mention how sporting stadia are also venues favoured by the more flamboyantly brutal regimes for the incarceration and assassination of masses of their citizens at once).

But at the end of the day  if I may drop into the brainless argot of the sports commentator for a moment  what I found myself repeatedly contemplating while reading this book is that there is, in fact, a sport that is largely innocent of the charges brought by Perelman. Forgiving, even at the highest level, in its notions of the ideal body type, and, at the amateur end, of levels of basic competence (up to a point; although the skipper of the team I play for broadcasts regular last-minute appeals, in order to make up the numbers, for someone who need be able to do no more than "walk unaided"), it has nevertheless managed to resist, despite enormous financial pressures, much of the vileness that Perelman exposes. It is, of course, cricket. Sadly, even though its (disputed) origins have been said to lie over the channel, the French have never embraced the game. With, as we can now see, disastrous consequences.

 Nicholas Lezard's The Nolympics, with drawings by David Shrigley, will be published by Penguin in September.