Bernard Ingham: End the suffering of this beautiful game corrupted by a world of greed

With those names on your sporting escutcheon, you never forget where you came from. You also carry with you the values of another age. I know because I regularly watch my grandson, now 16, playing soccer on Sundays, and we have seats in the stand at Crystal Palace, one of those clubs rescued from financial oblivion.

Thanks to ill-motivated coaches, the winding-up and dirty tricks on Sunday mornings can make Championship soccer look benign.

My son, who occasionally acts as a linesman, makes a mental note of where to avoid doing so again such can be the abuse from some parents.

Yet sometimes your heart is uplifted. Last winter, I found my grandson’s predominantly black opponents in SE London served by parents doing their level best for their kids from ramshackle old shipping containers. At the time, Wayne Rooney was playing hard to get for £250,000 a week. I still burn with resentment at the wilful neglect of the grassroots.

This is our national game. We don’t have much to feel proud about – especially after Barcelona’s master class for Manchester United – though the FA recently made me walk taller when it stood up against that incredible institution, Sepp Blatter’s FIFA.

Whether it would have done so had England – rather than Russia – been awarded the 2018 World Cup, is another matter. We are open to the charge of peevish sour grapes instead of unwavering principle that desperately needs to be brought to the management of the so-called beautiful game.

Everything it touches seems to corrupt it. It is not just that TV has brought riches beyond the dreams of avarice – and, therefore, criminal attention – to soccer; its clichéd introduction to any event with empty-noddled fans drunkenly bawling at cameras demean it as much as the banality of the average pundit.

Its management can only get worse as moneybags from other cultures, bent on glory and financial killings, demand instant results they cannot all have. Their gates can only get smaller as they price financially responsible families out of the stands. And it is only a matter of time before all clubs are technically bankrupt.

Sooner or later, the gravy train will run out of track. The warning signs are there for all to see.

According to one estimate, Premier League clubs lost £404m last year on a turnover of £2.122bn. Their total wage bill was £1,355bn.

About two-thirds of their entire income goes on paying wages to the mercenaries of the age – the rainbow mix of players who manage to secure a contract, as distinct from a regular team place, in the top 20 clubs.

I cannot see how some of the lossmakers, such as Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City, Aston Villa and Liverpool, can qualify to play in Europe since UEFA, sniffing the air, will only permit clubs to make cumulative losses of 45m euros (£39.7m) over the three seasons 2011-2014. Nor will they allow loaded owners to reduce the deficits out of their own pockets.

Please note, UEFA is not asking them to break even. Presumably its advisers are graduates of the Gordon Brown/Ed Balls School of Creative Financing.

As for FIFA, what hope is there for a game controlled by a bunch of cronies who have elevated mutual back-scratching into a cosily putrid form of world governance?

And who does it ask to clean it up? Why, Richard Nixon’s ancient Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the operatic tenor, Placido Domingo. You couldn’t make it up.

The time has come to recognise that soccer is part of the unholy mess represented by Britain’s perilous finances, public sector abuse of the taxpayer, Europe’s rapacious demands for ever more power and cash, and executive contempt for workers, customers and shareholders alike as their pay soars so steeply that even Sir Stuart Rose, ex-Marks & Spencer, thinks it needs looking at.

It cannot and should not go on like this. Soccer is suffering from the besetting sin of the early 21st century – the medieval arrogance of the moneyed classes whose operations distance them ever more from the people.

The Ambramoviches and the Fergusons and Rooneys of this world should feel as uncomfortable in the presence of their fellow men as the blasted bankers whose imprudence has cost us a decade of rising prosperity and wellbeing.

Yet neither exhibits a scintilla of shame. Instead, they leave Thistlebottom and Mytholmroyd far more disgusted than Tunbridge Wells ever imagined possible.