IF THE scandal engulfing Italian football has not yet grabbed you as the sports story of the year, imagine if Chelsea were in danger of being stripped of their past two league titles. Picture Frank Lampard pledging, as Alessandro Del Piero has done at Juventus, to play at Blackpool and Chesterfield in the event of his club being relegated two divisions.

Imagine the English game being so corrupt that Peter Kenyon, the Chelsea chief executive, was picking and choosing which referees could officiate which Barclays Premiership matches. Try to imagine the outcry if it had just been revealed that Kenyon had once locked Graham Poll in his dressing-room because he had not made favourable decisions.

Imagine Kenyon’s son running the most powerful football agency in the English game and demanding that clubs come grovelling for players and favours. And then throw in Blackburn Rovers facing relegation because of match-fixing. And Brian Barwick resigning. And Tony Blair being forced to appoint a commissioner to run the FA and FA Premier League.

The Italian football scandal is all of that and promises to be much more. Not even José Mourinho in his most paranoid moments could imagine such a cocktail of sinister conspiracies.

Evidence of alleged corruption at the top of the Italian FA mixes with almost comical reports that highlights on the equivalent of Match of the Day were apparently doctored to be kind to Juventus. The club’s former general manager, Luciano Moggi, spent hours giving evidence to prosecutors yesterday. He is fighting all the charges, but hours of bugged phone conversations have painted a picture of him as the sport’s Godfather, making offers that could not be refused to officials and referees.

And to think that it was not so long ago that we used to look up to Italian football. To think that it was cool to watch James Richardson presenting Channel 4’s Gazzetta on Sundays holding a pink newspaper and a cappuccino .

Ten years ago, when English clubs could not buy a result in the European Cup — and, on recent evidence, they should have tried — Juventus players seemed like gods when they visited Old Trafford. A top player would not be seen dead in the Premiership in those days. Serie A was the only place for someone such as Zinédine Zidane to pursue his career.

If the stripping away of the layers of corruption in Italy has not made a huge splash in Britain, perhaps it is because that admiration had already waned. With the growth of the Champions League has come a familiarity. And the more we have come to see of Italian football, the fewer reasons we have had for envy.

Go to many of the Italian grounds, such as the Stadio delle Alpi, and the facilities are archaic compared with almost every stadium in the Premiership. And even if the surroundings are acceptable, there are often intolerable levels of violence and racism.

On the pitch, the flow of talent has switched so that players such as Michael Ballack and Thierry Henry want to play in England, while a Premiership reject such as Patrick Vieira can be snapped up by Juventus. And then there is the fact that English clubs have started beating their Italian rivals, if not every time then certainly with a pleasing regularity.

English football had already seized the high ground, even before Italian football started rolling in the gutter. But the whole sordid affair inevitably raises the question — could it happen in England?

At a time when the Premier League has appointed a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner to investigate transfer bungs, it is certainly not the time to be complacent about corruption. The English game has also known its match-fixing scandals, although nothing like the scale, or the frequency, with which they occur in Italy.

Only last season, Genoa, the Serie B champions, were demoted to Serie C1 after fixing their final match against Venezia. A player’s agent was caught leaving the offices of Genoa’s president with €250,000 (about £170,000) in a suitcase.

There are some powerful individuals in the English game, with influence beyond their own clubs, but the archaic structure of the FA — such an obstacle to good governance — might, in fact, be seen as an effective policing system. Long live the factions. At least the infighting stops anyone from gaining too strong a grip.

And Richard Scudamore, the chief executive of the Premier League, insisted yesterday that the set-up of the PGMO, the organisation that appoints match officials, made it all but impossible for the system to be rigged. “The clubs are entirely insulated from the appointments process,” he said. “The structure we have set up would make it very difficult even if anyone wanted to attempt it.”

A more lengthy examination might also want to study the cultural differences between Italian and English football — a theme tackled by Gianluca Vialli in his book, The Italian Job. Examining the treatment of referees in both countries, he writes that “in Italy angry fans accuse referees of being corrupt, while in England they call them incompetent”. And never were we so grateful for our incompetent officials.

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