AS participants in childhood summer football matches will no doubt recall, one does not always realise at the time the potential damage to one's system that can be caused by hoofing a piece of leather around for hours in the merciless glare of the sun.

Back when I and each of my pals took for granted that we were invincible, it was not unusual for whole summer Saturday afternoons to be spent playing the Beautiful - and increasingly sweaty - Game for much longer than the standard 90 minutes.

As long as there were at least eight or nine of us, it was game on, and when the school holidays came, and with a generously-sized recreation ground at our disposal, two or three lengthy matches a week were not unusual.

And of course, healthy young men not knowing any better, it is perhaps stating the obvious to point out that the use of sun-cream was virtually unknown, t-shirts came off within five minutes of the kick-off, and half-time - if we observed such a quaint tradition - was inevitably spent sat in huddles in what passed for a centre circle, oblivious to the fact that the sun was merely cooking our stationary bodies all the more.

I realise these sun-dappled, peeled-skin recollections of late-1970s summers bear little relation to the increasingly ridiculous, self-serving and morally ambivalent world of professional football, particularly in its upper echelons.

I cannot help but crack a wee smile however, at the predicament that the game's global governing body FIFA has got itself into by - against all reason - selecting Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup finals.

FIFA's is a shadowy world of inter-continental backscratching and gift-bearing, that repeatedly trumpets the need to take the game to all parts of the world and damn the consequences.

And so we have the problem of the heat of summer in Qatar, and FIFA's increasingly desperate attempts to force its member nations to accept a late autumn or a winter World Cup finals and at least two seasons' disruption to club football itineraries.

At a rough guess, I would say that at the height of my invincibility - around the summer of 1978 - we played football pretty regularly in temperatures of 25-30C.

I spent most of my time during our interminable recreation ground matches trying to be Johan Cruyff and getting increasingly frustrated at my teammates' inability to replicate the dazzling interplay of the Dutch national team of the mid-late 1970s.

It was damn hard work, and we paid for it with bouts of gut-wrenching sickness during and after matches, shortness of breath, painful reddened faces, necks and backs, dizzy spells and the occasional bout of delirium.

As my memory serves, during one of the latter bouts experienced by one of my teammates, he spent a good few minutes convinced that we were in imminent danger of being trampled by a group of wild horses that had gathered on the neighbouring cricket square.

There were of course, no wild horses, and we dealt with him by lying him down in the shade of a nearby holly bush with a bottle of water and some sweaty t-shirts for a pillow, and resuming our match.

Of course, it might have been horribly different had we been playing in temperatures of 45-50C, which is apparently the norm in Qatar in the summer.

And of course, we being (fairly) normal early teenagers, we did not have the support of expert backroom teams who could no doubt organise us and advise us in a way that conserved energy.

Ultimately however, I think that even we young football fanatics might have baulked at the idea of playing in Qatar-like heat.

We were young, yes; we felt invincible, yes; in our dreams the prospect of actually being as good as Johan Cruyff and company felt tantalisingly close, yes.

But we weren't stupid.

It is difficult however, to make that same claim for the bigwigs of FIFA, with their fancy suits and £15,000 wristwatches, who are preparing to bulldoze decades of tradition and put the metaphorical noses of other sports out of joint by shifting the World Cup finals.

Earlier this week, Europe's biggest clubs voiced their collective concern at proposals for a winter World Cup finals.

And while it would be easier to sympathise with them had their main concern been their players' welfare rather than their revenue streams, they nevertheless have a point.

Put simply, just as one would never consider hosting a World Cup finals on our old recreation ground - height of summer or not - so should FIFA never have considered hosting a World Cup finals in Qatar.

Air-conditioned stadia and fanparks notwithstanding, as far as players' health is concerned, this is a recipe for something far more serious than imaginary wild horses.