Sport losing capacity to inspire us all - Fifa corruption

We express our best instincts and hopes — the worst too — through many mediums but few represent the human spirit and human frailty as brightly or as loudly as sport. 

It is a universal, often beautiful, language expressed through many idioms. It is a common cause and one of the great ice-breakers driving human interaction, one of the warming, uplifting things we do. It is a constant in our befuddled world.

It is also, at the highest levels of professional sport, an utterly corrupt business. The old Corinthian ideals that made sport such a worthwhile sampler for life are almost anachronisms in a world where sport often seems more like The Sopranos than The Sunday Game. The eight-year ban imposed on soccer bosses Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini by Fifa’s ethics committe yesterday is just another indictment of the highest-bidder-takes-all culture turning what should be a pleasure into an odious and stinks-to-high-heaven sleazefest. That Blatter and Platini are to appeal the ruling to sports’ Court of Arbitration just extends the charade.