When football is at its best, there is no other team sport in the world that can touch it (and spare me the guff about hurling, please).

So why is it so tough to make good television drama about football? There’s been a rash of excellent football documentaries in recent times. Football has also proved fertile ground over the years for comedy, with the likes of Apple’s Ted Lasso, Nickelodeon’s 1990s teen sitcom Renford Rejects and the lovely 1983 Channel 4 film Those Glory Glory Days (available on All 4), football writer Julie Welch’s account of her Spurs-obsessed childhood, featuring a cameo from her hero, Danny Blanchflower.

Given the excitement and emotion the game can generate, it should be perfect material for drama. But whenever it’s tackled football over the years, the results have been extremely mixed.

Last year’s Netflix period miniseries The English Game was dire. Written by Downton Abbey perpetrator Julian Fellowes, this was supposedly the true story of the 19th-century origins of the modern game. In reality, it was corny, cliché-littered tosh about t’workers from t’mill taking on t’toffs on t’hill.

Despite featuring real-life figures, it was stuffed with the kind of historical inaccuracies and made-up nonsense you’d expect from Fellowes, who admitted to knowing nothing about football.

Also — and this is a frequent weakness in football-themed dramas — the actual football scenes were clumsy and unconvincing. The free-flowing, spontaneous action of a football match is a hard thing to replicate using choreography and clever camerawork.

If you’ve ever seen John Huston’s daft but endearing POW movie Escape to Victory, starring Michael Caine as an unlikely ex-England captain and the inflexible Sylvester Stallone as an even more unlikely goalkeeper, you’ll know what I mean.

One drama that did a fine job of capturing both the history and the action was the 1982 ITV film The World Cup: A Captain’s Tale, which told the wonderful true story of how West Auckland FC, a team of Durham part-timers captained by miner Bob Jones (Dennis Waterman), represented England at the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy — often known as “the first World Cup” — in Turin in 1909 and 1911.

They won it on both occasions (in the 1911 final, they beat then amateur side Juventus 6-1) and got to keep the trophy in perpetuity. The film is on YouTube, albeit in a fuzzy copy.

Sky One’s soapy Dream Team, which ran for 10 years and focused on the fortunes of the fictional Harchester United, cleverly used rotoscoping to drop the Harchester United “players” into real match footage. Pity the scripts weren’t as convincing. One especially outlandish storyline featured a striker being shot by a sniper after an FA Cup Final.

Ironically, football dramas tend to work best when they keep the on-pitch action to a minimum. The 1989 Channel 4 series The Manageress, which starred Cherie Lunghi as the first woman to be appointed a club manager in the old English second division, concentrated on the back-room battles she faced, not least against ingrained sexism.

Arguably the best football drama of all, the brilliant BBC2 feature-length film United (2011), didn’t show so much as a single ball being kicked in anger.

Set just after the 1958 Munich air disaster that killed eight of Manchester United’s “Busy Babes”, it focused on the struggles of Bobby Charlton (Jack O’Connell), who’s suffering survivor’s guilt, and assistant manager Jimmy Murphy (a superb David Tennant), who has to keep the club from falling apart while Matt Busby (Dougray Scott) recovers in a German hospital.

But at the end of the day, the only thing that can capture the thrill of real, live football is real, live football.