NOT TOO LONG AGO, THE GERMAN FA was routinely criticised for being out of touch, an outdated old boys’ club stuck to the same retrograde ideals that prevented German football from turning professional until the late 1950s. Not now. Maybe it is the imminent World Cup, to be held in Germany in the summer of 2006; maybe it is the realisation that when English clubs created the Premiership and started talking about stock-market flotations and merchandising, revenue streams and opening up Asian markets, some people got very rich; or maybe some persuasive member of the German blazer brigade rented the film Wall Street recently and was mesmerised by the Gordon Gecko speech.

“Greed, for lack of a better of a word, is good,” Gecko, played by Michael Douglas, says. “Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed . . . has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

Two separate moves by the German football federation (DFB) would seem to suggest that it is looking to mark the upward surge of the German game by being more corporate, professional and downright greedy. First, it announced that it was going to get into the bookmaking business. “We would like our fair share of the betting market,” Theo Zwanziger, the DFB’s joint president, said. “At the moment, we provide the conditions for the bets to take place, but others take the money.”

What Zwanziger means when he says that the DFB provides the conditions for the bets to take place is that the German Football League organises football matches. Which is exactly what it is supposed to do. It is the whole point of its existence. And because there are people who bet on those games, Zwanziger believes that the DFB should get a piece of the pie. The DFB now not only wants to starts its own bookmaking operation, it wants to licen se bookmakers in Germany and, obviously, receive royalties.

Given the recent scandal when a referee, Robert Hoyzer (who received a lifetime ban), was convicted of taking money from betting rings to fix matches, the DFB has a handy pretext in saying it wants to “clean up the game”. Its supporters say it is a little bit like the campaign to legalise marijuana: it cuts out the criminal element and makes everything safer and above board. Except it is not.

There is a difference between legalising marijuana and a government growing acres of it, advertising it on television and encouraging people to enjoy a spliff before brushing their teeth every morning.

Not to mention the fact that bookmaking, like most business ventures, is a risky affair, where money can be made or lost, particularly if you don’t enjoy a monopoly and have to offer competitive odds. Or that it leaves you open to the appearance of impropriety. Would you place a bet on a horse with a bookie if he was organising the race, owned all the horses and employed all the jockeys, stewards and judges?

Football associations exist to promote football. Sure, they may make a few bob in hawking football kits to 8-year-olds, selling TV rights and signing sponsorship deals. But at least it is all directly related to football and the marketing of the game. Sports betting is not. It is purely a money-making exercise. What is the DFB going to do next? Open a hedge fund? Sell mobile phone ringtones?

The DFB followed this up last week by announcing that all Germany players will have to use equipment supplied by adidas, the team’s official sponsor. “There won’t be any Germany players with any boot other than adidas,” Jürgen Klinsmann, the Germany manager, said. “If any player insists on playing with his own boots, well, he simply won’t be included in the squad. And he won’t be able to take legal action either. You can’t sue over not being picked.”

Klinsmann and the DFB don’t want to anger adidas, who paid a considerable amount of money to ensure that viewers never see Michael Ballack in anything other than adidas gear. The problem is that Klinsmann’s job is not to arrange a four-week fashion show for Germany footballers. His job is to get them to win the World Cup. And since boots are the tools of a footballer’s trade, wouldn’t it make more sense to ensure that a player wears whatever he is most comfortable with? Unless, of course, there is no difference between an adidas boot and any other boot, in which case there would be no reason for the players to complain. But if that were true, there would also be no reason for anyone to buy adidas over any other brand. And nobody wants anyone to think that.

There is no point in being sanctimonious. Prioritising money ahead of sport may be a reasonable ethical choice for individuals who have mortgages to pay and families to feed, but the DFB is not an individual. It is a not-for-profit entity charged with promoting and nurturing German football. It seems to be confusing corporate professionalism with pure greed.

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