I am impressed by how often the cameramen, and directors, of sports broadcasts manage to get images of athletes spitting … into our living rooms via television.

Baseball’s World Series manages to get bearded players spewing streams of brown “tobacco juice”. If a viewer is lucky, guys in the dugout might limit their expectorations to the shells of sunflower seeds.

American football players have issues spitting because of facemasks and visors. It would be like spitting from the inside of your car with the windows up.

Basketball players also have a rough time finding a place to spit; fans are right there at courtside. But another indoor sport, ice hockey, seems to do just “fine” — letting fly right there on the ice, which is a different and special kind of gross, frozen loogies. (You do not want to know what is scraped off the ice by the Zamboni, between periods.)

But the worst sports phlegm bandits? The most commonly seen and most disgusting?

That would have to be soccer players.

Soccer players are spitting machines.

Especially in cold weather, when all that running seems to bring mucous by the quart up out of their lungs.

Some of it gets into their mouths, and nearly any slowdown in the pace of the game allows us to see all the players and some of the coaches (looking at you, Pep Guardiola) fouling the pitch with ropey jets of phlegm. (It’s a miracle players don’t slip on some of this stuff.)

Soccer’s guys take it to another level, however, when in addition to their copious spitting they add the infamous “farmer’s nose-blow”. I did an item on this a few years ago, referring to the resulting jet of slime as “snot rockets“.

This wasn’t the same problem it is now, 20 years ago — before every match everywhere was on TV. Guys down on the pitch could eject a discreet gob of whatever, and no one past the first few rows of the pitch would see it.

TV makes it worse, by far, by lingering over those getting ready to blow. Focusing the attention of millions of viewers on something we probably would have not seen, while in a stadium.

For those of us who do not enjoy watching soccer players void excess mucous, we could really stand a little help from the TV guys.

When there is a break in action and they feel tempted to do a closeup of a guy who has been involved with a recent play … be prepared to shift to another camera tout de suite — before the guy lets fly

And, as you settle on a closeup, when one of those guys puts a finger to the side of his nose, switch to another camera immediately — unless you want to disgust us with that, you miserable TV cretin.