I WONDER who Marlon King will be playing for, a year or so from now, when he gets out of prison for having groped and then twatted that young woman in a nightclub? The obvious answer is Oldham Athletic, who were waiting by the cell doors with a lucrative contract in their paws when Lee Hughes was released from jail for having killed someone in his expensive Mercedes car and then running away afterwards. But there’s always Newcastle Utd, I suppose, who were perfectly happy to take on Joey Barton. I assume that even people as divorced from reality as the Newcastle board were aware Barton was a violent thug with a string of previous when they took him on. The lure was he was comparatively cheap and might do a job in midfield — morality did not come into it. Their only worry was the possibility that Barton’s future behaviour may cost them money. It was to Alan Shearer’s enormous credit that he took one look at Barton and told him to get lost. But it was Shearer who left, in the end.

Marlon King’s agent, a chap called Tony Finnegan, is absolutely right when he says that morality will not enter the equation at all. “There’s no moral judgment in football and the fact that the person we’re talking about will score goals will blot any moral values people have,” he is reported as having said. This certainly seems to be the way things will go. We should probably skirt over the “will score goals” bit, though, seeing that at his last three clubs Marlon King averaged one goal in every six games. But a year or so from now, King will emerge saying “I am a changed man. All I want to do is concentrate on my football. I am grateful to have been given this second chance and I’d like to add that I have always enjoyed playing at Boundary Park.”

Dave Whelan, the chairman of Wigan, certainly seemed a little disingenuous when he said that his expensive striker was “absolutely sacked”, upon hearing the judge’s sentence. One wonders if he would have said quite the same sort of thing if King had received a suspended sentence or been asked to paint the walls of a local community centre for 200 hours. Certainly, his view was very different when he signed the player originally, presumably knowing full well of King’s 13 — count them — previous convictions for beating people up, assaulting a police officer, nicking cars and the like. The usual defence when a club chairman signs a jailbird is to insist, with a slightly pained liberal expression, that the past is the past, that here is a man who has committed a crime and served his punishment — we are simply happy to help, somehow, in the important rehabilitative treatment which was begun by the courts. Whelan’s position now, then, is intellectually and morally incoherent — all the more so when you consider that he has said that King should not play for any club when he is released from prison.

Why does this latest crime differ from the previous ones, Dave? There were, after all, 13 of them.

Not every club behaved quite so shamelessly. Fulham very nearly signed Marlon King a while back, but the deal was scuppered when the club’s chairman, Mohammed al-Fayed caught sight of King’s string of convictions and decided he was not the right man. The last-minute hitch was passed off as a problem with the player’s medical, which was kind, if deceitful, of them. And you have to say, when Mohammed al-Fayed is worrying about a person’s moral state then you know you ain’t dealing with Mother Teresa, no offence, Mo.

King’s agent, the ebullient Mr Finnegan, has said that King was undoubtedly “disappointed” by the verdict of the court but, because he is a grown-up, he will serve his time. Which is very decent of him, you have to say. It strikes me that Mr King will serve his time primarily because his cell door is locked shut every night and there’s lots of barbed wire around the perimeter fence. If sitting down in a cell for the next year is concomitant with being “grown-up” then I would suggest we are living in a singularly immature democracy. But it was an interesting use of the word “disappointed” in that press statement from Mr Finnegan who, in a live television interview, brushed aside King’s criminal convictions by saying, ‘We’ve all got a record, you’ve probably got one, I’ve got one’. Really? And what’s your record for, Tone, now that you’ve brought the matter up? And Finnegan’s comments on the matter are a source of some confusion. In December 2008 when King was arrested, Finnegan said the charges would be dismissed because he had been with his client all evening and he had behaved impeccably. Now, at the time of the court case, Finnegan said that King assured him he hadn’t punched the woman; the first-person witness stuff had disappeared.

Still, King will emerge; he will play for a lower league club for whom he will score a reasonable amount of goals and the morality of it all will worry nobody in football except for the fans on the opposing terraces. They will give him hell, permanently, unless chanting has been outlawed by the time he is released.