Amygdala

So Sepp Blatter couldn’t be dethroned because of the extraordinary corruption of the organization he ruled, the pointlessness of his job, the outrageousness of his compensation, his views on women or homosexuality, but, like Al Capone tripped up by the taxman, he could now find himself on the wrong end of a football boot because of a brief conversation in halting English on the subject of racism in football.

What exactly did he say? Asked if racism was a problem on the pitch, Blatter told CNN World Sport: “I would deny it. There is no racism, there is maybe one of the players towards another, he has a word or a gesture which is not the correct one, but also the one who is affected by that. He should say that this is a game. At the end of the game, we shake hands.”

He also said, on Al Jazeera: “During a match you may say something to someone who’s not looking exactly like you, but at end of match it’s forgotten.”

To me this appears to be someone saying, in a foreign language in which they are not fluent, that while there are individual incidents of racist abuse that happen on the pitch, there is no institutionalised racism running through football. In addition he seems to be saying that in football abuse of all kinds is part of the sledging of opponents that is itself an integral part of the game and that it is forgotten at the final whistle. Now you can agree with that or disagree with it, but the storm that has followed is a joke. It’s proof that you no longer need a poisoned umbrella or polonium to bump off your opponents, just embroil them in a manufactured controversy about race.

The reaction to Blatter’s comments started reasonable and quickly became hysterical. He was accused of being out of touch. Really? A 70-year old chief executive out of touch? Amazing. Maybe we should re-think those extensions of the retirement age.

But soon the Twitterati realised that they had to raise the stakes. People became stunned, disgusted, they reeled in disbelief. You wonder how they maintain stasis in every day life if they’re so highly strung. No more baguettes in Pain Quotidian? I can’t feel my hands. The yoga class has been cancelled? I’m having a stroke.

You can only be stunned or disgusted by Blatter’s comments if you deliberately misinterpret them as racist in themselves, which is what the Ferdinands and other paragons of probity are doing.  Gordon Taylor?  Of the PFA? Spare me.

This is sanctimonious rubbish from a bunch of people whom we should ignore. Footballers on the pitch are professional cheats, professional liars, professionally foul-mouthed and sometimes violent to each other and to the match officials and generally speaking, unbelieveably badly behaved by any normal standards and indeed by the standards of any other sport.

They encourage and enjoy the adversarial chanting of the crowds, deemed to be an integral part of the game, most of which is so offensive that it is censored from TV coverage.

And in many cases they take their on-pitch behaviour off it and into the clubs and rape cases they inhabit on their days off.

Moreover the industry that pays them their millions and backs them regardless of their misdeeds is itself riddled with corruption and illegality on a global basis, as stories of tax evading managers, crooked agents and club cheating prove.

Assuming that it is worse to call someone a ‘black c**t’ than it is to call them an ‘Irish sp***ic’ or a ‘fu***ng pansy, and in the UK racism is a criminal offence, then the alleged crimes of Terry and Suarez are worse than the continuous obscenities cast about by every player in the league. But are they proof that there ‘is racism in football’ in the sense that the Twitterati claim and is it such a crime for Blatter to question that?

The immediate assumption that institutionalised racism is everywhere and that those who question that assumption are themselves racist is wrong. And one wonders what the response to the comments would have been if Blatter had been black. I doubt Ferdinand would have felt so comfortable in his mock outrage – it might have been more obvious then that it was artificial and hyperbolic.

Sepp Blatter is a symbol of much that is wrong with football, but so are the players who week in, week out, mob referees, dive, foul and, most pertinent to their faked outrage here, routinely hurl the vilest obscenities at each other.

If you want to kick racist comments from the pitch and the terraces, make football a proper sport. Ban players for all types of offensive behaviour on the pitch; charge them with assault for deliberate fouls; get them to state that they do not want rival supporters to slag each other off or fight and ban the terrace chants as sectarian in the same way that Scotland is trying. Ludicrous I know. Why? Because beneath a very, very thin veneer of hypocrisy and cant, football is the ugliest of games.