What qualifications do you suppose you need to become a vice-president of Fifa? Obviously it helps if you are a morally filthy, corrupt autocrat, simultaneously loathed and feared in your homeland. But you also need to be able to connive; to ingratiate yourself with some of this planet’s less agreeable human beings – such as Sepp Blatter. A total and utter disregard for football would be useful and an extended family, for taking advantage of business “opportunities” that may arise, more useful still.

But you must surely also need a vague facility for diplomacy, what with all that horse-trading to be done. Don’t make too many enemies, try to keep everyone onside. You would think that might be the case.

One of the current vice-presidents of Fifa is Jack Warner, who hails from one of either Trinidad or Tobago – he is also the president of Concacaf, the organisation that looks after the footballing interests of the nations in North and Central America and the Caribbean.

I ought to point out straight away that Jack is not necessarily a morally filthy, corrupt autocrat who is loathed and feared in Trinidad & Tobago – that was just a job spec I was advancing above. Thought I ought to make that clear, before we proceed any further.

Mr Warner has recently divested himself of his views about England and its contribution to world football. He has pronounced himself determined to stop England winning the bid to host the 2018 World Cup and added the following: “Nobody in Europe likes England. England – who invented the sport – have never had any impact upon world football. England at no time has had the love and support of Europe. Europe considers England an irritant.” This is the supposedly disinterested vice-president of Fifa speaking, and Fifa has yet to dissociate itself from his views.

It’s an odd thing for Mr Warner to say. England have won the World Cup once and appeared in eight quarter-finals and two semi-finals since 1934. In the same period the entire region of which Jack is president has managed three quarter-final appearances – two of them courtesy of Mexico, playing at home, in 1970 and 1986.

Notwithstanding Concacaf’s dismal performance, its representation at the final stages has increased almost fourfold since Jack became president. We lucky punters now get to see the fantastically useless Trinidad & Tobago or Jamaica playing in the World Cup finals – rather than, say, Turkey or Russia, for which many thanks, Jack.

I’m not sure he is right about England inventing the sport, either – codified its rules, maybe, in our usual public school punctilious manner. Perhaps Mr Warner was just being generous in this regard.

I’ve been trying to work out the source of Mr Warner’s Anglophobia, which seems to extend beyond a mere wish to see a Concacaf nation host the 2018 tournament. Perhaps it has been occasioned by a certain doggedness on the part of some Englishmen – not from the FA, of course, who predictably couldn’t give a monkey’s – to investigate Mr Warner’s personal financial arrangements. Largely, it has to be said, journalists (and especially from the BBC’s Panorama team). But also accountants. Ernst & Young, the Fifa auditor, estimated that Mr Warner’s family had trousered at least $1m from reselling tickets for the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

It has been alleged that Mr Warner’s son – a ticket agent, natch – sold 5,400 tickets for games involving England and Italy and so on. Of course, faced with this evidence, Fifa was forced, much against its will, to “investigate” Jack Warner itself. It concluded that because it was his son who had sold the allocation of tickets, rather than Jack, then Jack couldn’t really be disciplined. Should the sins of the son be visited upon the father? No, of course not: Fifa must have concluded that it was a mere coincidence that the grossly unethical reselling of the Fifa ticket allocation happened to have been done by someone in Jack’s family. However, it issued Mr Warner a “stern” reprimand and reportedly fined his family nearly $1m.

In any other line of business, you might think it peculiar that a chap like Jack Warner – having been officially reprimanded and with his financial affairs held up to scrutiny – should be allowed to continue as a vice-president of the organisation. But that would be to forget, or dismiss, the fact that the president himself is Sepp Blatter, a man who has not been entirely free of allegations of corruption and bribery during his seemingly never-ending tenure.

The FA has reacted with a vague pique to Warner’s comments. Even the outgoing sports minister, Richard Caborn, indulgently chuckled to himself and said: “Well, that’s Jack.”

Yes, it is indeed Jack – and he should be attracting more than our mild opprobrium. Imagine for a moment if some Fifa bigwig pronounced that the Caribbean countries had always been useless at football, that nobody liked them and that he intended to do everything he could to stop them hosting a tournament. Can you imagine the furore that would result? He’d be out of a job and probably investigated for a hate crime.

But it was said about England, so we shrug our shoulders and think no more about it.