Sports – sporting activities – are one of mankind's greatest inventions. Sport channels man's physicality, intelligence, creativity, imagination and aggression into harmless and entertaining activities. Without sports there would be more wars, more assaults, more apathy, more ill health, and probably more crime. The massed thronging to the favoured team's next fixture is the highlight of the week for many people. It enables an outlet for repressed emotion and frustration; it stimulates imagination, aspiration and passion; it encapsulates all of history's ambitions and dreams of glory. One only has to view the wild outpourings of ecstasy or despair amongst the vast crowds attending a Premier League football match on a Saturday afternoon to realise the crucial importance of the game to their essential beings. And that is only amongst the spectators. For most of the participants, those appearances probably represent the peak of attainment of their entire lives.

For those reasons sporting activities have a huge impact on both the economic state and the morale of the nation. The benefit of holding the four yearly Olympic Games occasions a significant increase in productivity and celebration amongst whole populations. The winning of a World Cup in any sport is an event which lives forever in a country's historical memory.

Consequently, a vast amount of money is involved in the business. The income from ticket sales, TV rights, sponsorships, etc. runs into billions. Top sporting names are as wealthy as pop or Hollywood film stars. Mega-wealthy entrepreneurs are enticed into spending huge outlays on the ownership or sponsorship of football teams, racing stables, and sea-going yachts.

Even so, many sporting institutions are constantly teetering on the edge of disaster. Formula One's racing teams require huge injections of cash from their parent motoring organisations in order to keep competing. Football teams can go bankrupt at the downgrading of their side to a lower tier in the FA's organisation. The whole of the rugby world – both union and league – is in deep financial crisis, with the majority of clubs in technical insolvency. The enormous investment in facilities required to stage a modern international games event continues to deter many nations from applying.

So what is the answer? I cannot contribute to the overall economic debate about such matters, but two factors occur to me as an amateur spectator who enjoys watching a fair cross section of activities, from football to golf to snooker. One is that there are far too many different forms of sport, which dissipates the available income across the limited number of outlets. And secondly that many sports require fundamental changes to their rules to make them more appealing to the spectator.

Despite the passionate support of their followers – who are in most cases indoctrinated to their cause through generations of family habit – many sports offer a pretty inferior experience. I think particularly of sports such as American football, in which teams of completely unrecognisable athletes fight each other in a chaotic melee of armoured bodies over a ball whose situation is often unknown to the audience, where the tactics are incomprehensible, and the game stops and starts every few seconds. I think of motor racing, where lines of cars flash past the spectators at such a speed that they can't be individually recognised, and where the main interest comes from the number of collisions occurring and from the technical commentary of the pundits in the media, which is much better received at home in the comfort of one's armchair (okay, I'm in a minority on that one). I think of rugby, in which the two forms compete with one another – one in a tedious repetition of moves designed to counteract the anarchy of the other – in which injury and constant infringement of regulations dominate the format.

I am constantly frustrated by watching rugby union, especially, and the flaws in its rules seem to me to lie at the heart of the game's economic problem. Forget the talk of elitism, financial mismanagement, limited TV exposure, etc. It is the game itself that is the problem. I live in a city, Bath, where the local rugby team are the heroes of the community. The famous Recreation Ground ('The Rec') sits in the heart of the gorgeous town, surrounded by green hills and elegant architecture, and on match days it seems the entire populace are out, thronging the pubs and restaurants before scrambling to find their seats in the constricted stadium. Yet once the game begins, the frustrations immediately become apparent. The ref's whistle blows within minutes and continues to blow at regular intervals throughout the entire match. The whole event is conditioned by the stop-start nature of the sport.

Every time a likely move is made by one team or the other, it is inevitably halted by the ref spotting some minor infringement, which brings the whole procedure to a halt. Then whole minutes are wasted whilst scrums are organised, collapsed, and organised again, or by the forwards belatedly lining up for a throw-in, or the fly half minutely lining up his penalty kick (more often than not, victories are decided, not by who scores the most tries, but by which side has the best penalty kicker). It has been calculated that less than thirty per cent of rugby's game time is spent with the ball in actual play, which is ridiculous.

The solution has to be to get rid of many of the petty rules that govern the sport. Let's take the knock on. Time and again the game is halted for some small inconsequential fumble of the ball, which disadvantages the perpetrator in any case. I say – if the knock-on is accidental and the ball stays within the player's reach, then let the play flow. Another example – releasing the ball after a tackle. How can a player immediately release the bloody thing (or for that matter, roll away) when he has six twenty-stone opponents on top of him? The ref should allow ten seconds at least for him to do something with it before blowing his whistle. Most aggravating for me is the disallowed try. How many times do we have to sit through tedious VAR replays to determine whether the scorer was 'in full command of the ball' before granting the points? For heaven's sake – if he has been the first to touch it down with whatever part of his body, it's a try!

And so on, and so on. Many other examples, often totally invisible to the onlookers, which interfere with the run of play. One final point – stop the clock for throw-ins, scrum settings, and penalty kicks. Give us our money's worth of rugby.

Football, on the other hand, is a far more successful sport, as witnessed by the huge stadia in almost every country dedicated to its performance, the passionate support of millions of people, and the vast sums deemed to be the worth of top players. It is indeed 'the beautiful game', and the skills exhibited on the pitch are extraordinary. But even here I have a serious complaint. A successful penalty kick can change the whole outcome of a game. Yet, time and again, penalties are granted under the most debatable of circumstances.

Whole minutes are spent showing endless VAR replays to determine whether an incident was a push, a trip, a dive, or a handball, and even when the result is granted by the ref, the TV pundits still dispute his or her decision. To me, the obvious solution is that, unless the case involves a serious card offence, the ref grants not a penalty kick but a corner. A good scoring opportunity, but not a questionable game-changing moment.

Golf is another sport in which many petty regulations could be abandoned. (With technology playing such a large part in the game, there are even regulations over the size and shape of grooves on a club face!) However, I do not have enough space to expand on that one. But the point is that we cannot control every eventuality that may arise over human activities whose very essence is competitiveness (governments inclined to nanny-state political controls also take note).

There are probably basic rule changes which would improve all sports. As skills and equipment develop, it is inevitable that formats will develop also. Tennis is a game where players nearing seven feet in height are beginning to dominate the whole process with unreturnable serves. Simple solution – move the halfway service line six inches towards the net.

However, far too many games are controlled by committees of elderly ex-players who are so steeped in their own historic view of contests that they cannot take an objective view of how things could be improved in the modern age. It requires more input from the new generations of players who are actually involved on the playing field to alter things for the better. Or from less talented but objective fans like myself, who are fed up with wanting to throw my beer glass at the TV screen when the ref blows his whistle yet again!