The tragic events in Port Said last week, where 74 people were killed and hundreds more injured following a football match between al-Masry and al-Ahly, press upon us the perennial question of whether the world would be better if we banned sport.

This question raises its head with depressing regularity, as fanatical devotees of different teams learn first to hate and then to kill one another. This kind of behaviour has no place in a civilised society.

I should make it clear, straight away, that I am not advocating a total ban on sport. If people insist on dressing up in garish outfits, wearing scarves and strange headgear, waving flags and chanting meaningless songs, then they should be free to do so – but in the privacy of their own homes.

Most of us wish to live in a liberal and tolerant society in which people are free to be what they want (unlike on the football terraces, of course, where coming out as an opposition supporter is a hazardous business). Accordingly, no-one should be prevented from turning his or her home into the most lurid shrine to whichever sporting hero they happen to be worshipping that week. That kind of behaviour, however, belongs at home. It has no place in public.

Some people will point out at this juncture that it is not, in fact, sport that is at fault, but rather localised political forces that use sporting events to work out their own poisonous and divisive agendas. Try telling that to relatives of those killed in Port Said last night or at the Heysel Stadium in 1985 or any number of murderous sporting venues across the world.  The argument is rubbish. It’s strange how these “localised political forces” are local to Cairo and to Glasgow and to Warsaw and to Zagreb.

In all fairness, that argument is at least stronger that than argument that sport brings people together in harmony and communal celebration. Have the people who spout this nonsense ever actually been to a match? Have they no idea of what true fans actually believe? Do they not realise how primitive and tribal sport really is? Peace, harmony and love of fellow human beings is not what first comes to mind when I think of Chelsea’s Headhunters, Millwall’s Bushwackers, Birmingham’s Zulus or West Ham’s InterCity Firm?

Some people like to claim that there is a natural human tendency to be sporty, and that this is the result of some kind of Darwinian adaptation. Being agile, fit and capable of co-operating within small group, they argue, would have delivered some kind of evolutionary advantage. It is easy to see why ‘genes for sport’, if you’ll excuse the rather crass way this argument is usually put, have been preserved and passed on.

Whether or not this is true – and it is important to point out that the scientific community is divided on the matter – it is irrelevant. The fact that some form of proto-sporting prowess may have delivered a survival advantage in the Pleistocene is no reason to preserve let alone encourage the practice of sport today. Such skills are quite clearly redundant in a modern, post-industrial society like our own.

What about the idea that sport actually makes some people happy? Should we not encourage, or at least tolerate it, for that reason alone? This is at least a stronger argument but it still crashes and burns for pretty basic utilitarian reasons.

No doubt, many of the fanatics that populate our stadia do draw some solace from a sense of belonging to a team. It apparently gives them a feeling of identity and purpose in life, although heaven alone knows why they can’t get identity and purpose from the kind of things that the rest of us do.

Even assuming we recognise and tolerate these misguided feelings of comfort and mutual support, however, the tribal loyalties that sport engenders, the hatred it encourages, and the violence it sanctions far outweigh any positive good it delivers.

There is, therefore, no good reason for the continued public presence of sport. To repeat myself: who and what people say, do and worship in the privacy of their own homes is their own business. But in a modern, liberal, tolerant society like our own there is no place for this primitive, divisive, tribalism.

A version of this blog first appeared in the Guardian.