John Nicholson

Cheating is endemic in football. The game offers many opportunities to cheat and it is routine for players to try and take advantage.

So many players betray a sheer lack of basic honesty; they try to claim corners and throw-ins when they know it's come off them. They feign injury to get opposition players sent off or to disrupt play. They dive to get penalties or free-kicks, they obstruct and shirt pull. The nip, punch and elbow each other. In short they do anything they can to seek to gain an advantage and they will not admit to the crime until the game is over and the evidence is undeniable.

If such cheating happened in any other sport it would be considered shocking. If a snooker player moved a cue ball to a better position while the referee wasn't looking, he'd be considered utterly corrupt. Same goes for a golfer who moves a ball. Yes, team games are always going to invite more cheating - but rugby, cricket, hockey or even basketball do not tolerate the endemic levels of attempted and actual deception that occurs in football. If a cricketer scoops a ball up after it's hit the ground and claims a catch, he is condemned as an absolute bounder, Sir. In football, that level of cheating isn't really even thought of as cheating. It's just doing what it takes to win.

So accustomed to cheating are we that when a player does something honest - such the Robbie Fowler penalty incident all those years ago - it's hailed as an act of a saint. That's how warped the game already is.

In that sense, football's culture is innately corrupt. It tolerates cheating, sometimes even condones aspects of it. It's all part of the game.

So it's surprising that for so long, so many in football have claimed that the game is not corrupt in bigger, more lucrative ways; that match-fixing is a rare thing; that paying off referees is a practice for banana republics.

We have the occasional example of bribery and corruption in the past, and more recently in Italy and Germany, but everyone likes to think that this is little more than a few bad apples.

However, on Friday it was announced that the German police had arrested 17 people about alleged match-fixing and they considered up to 200 others were involved including referees and over 30 players in several European countries from Germany to Hungary and Turkey. Games in the Champions League qualifiers and Europa League are involved as well as many domestic league games.

So far, no English clubs, players or referees have been involved - but given the widespread nature of this corruption, it seems likely that at some point past, present or future, they will be. People in British football are not genetically less programmed to be corrupt. Perhaps they're just better at covering it up.

But then we've always kind of suspected this, haven't we?

Without, for obvious legal reasons, specifying any particular results and refereeing decisions, it's fair to say that every season, calls are made by referees that are inexplicably wrong; we've all seen them. Equally, inexplicably odd things happen in football games - terrible penalties, rash challenges, missed open goals, strange results and we've always wondered, hmmmm now just how did that happen?

Clearly, football is a game of infinite variation and subject to the full panoply of human foibles and errors, so such oddities are always put down to the vagaries of the game. But are they always? This would have been said about all those games which were fixed. Those matches would not have looked any different to any other game of football.

It is in football's innate variables that corruption can easily hide. It's hard to prove but easy to suspect.

We know players are used to cheating; they do it all the time in minor ways. It is not a leap of imagination to see a few of them cheating in major ways, especially players who are not well paid in the lower leagues or even well-paid players who have financial problems. It's easy money and hard to prove you've been bought off.

Given those involved in this investigation have said they have uncovered the tip of an iceberg, coming so soon after the Thierry Henry handball, it really does begin to question the integrity and veracity of the game. Are we really watching fair contests all of the time in all competitions? Increasingly, it would seem we'd be naive to think so.

Who knows where these investigations will lead? People will say that it's not widespread - that may or may not be the case - but it doesn't have to be, because football is one body with many limbs. One infected part could eventually destroy the whole.

If a Champions League qualifying match is fixed, that affects the whole of the tournament. It is forever altered by that corruption. One bent keeper paid to let in two goals to make a bet successful alters the whole of the league they play in even if ten other team-mates are innocent. We already mistrust players' footballing intentions on the pitch - if we can't trust the results to be honestly achieved, the game is surely invalidated.

If you can get to a World Cup by such cheating as handling the ball, why not by paying a referee to make decisions to facilitate the likelihood of a favourable outcome? Why not pay a keeper to be a second too slow to dive for a ball? Why not pay a player to miss any penalties awarded? It's all cheating. It all makes the result of the game dishonest and dishonesty in football is a mycelium that spreads from top to bottom of the game.

Those with a vested interest in football are extremely keen to down play the possibility that match-fixing, bribery and corruption are anything other than occasional incidents because football is like a currency - as soon as enough people stop believing in its worth, it ceases to have any value.

Given the levels of financial reward in football, that gives all concerned a reason to hope the corruption is uncovered and purged from the game, but, perhaps more realistically, it will be swept under the carpet so we can all go on pretending that the game is legal, decent, honest and truthful.