A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound
A buck or a pound
A buck or a pound
Is all that makes the world go around
That clinking clanking sound
from Cabaret

How do you think he felt? Abused, betrayed, like a piece of meat, bereft of human dignity, a mere commodity, a piece of flesh to be traded in, nothing more nor less than a whore. Mind you, his pain was eased because he will be paid £770,000 for 45 days' work. Ain't nothing wrong with the game, dearie, so long as a girl gets a fair rate for the job.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni, India cricketer, was valued at this sum by the process of auction. I suppose most of us, when offered a choice between dignity and three quarters of a million, would tend to sway towards obscene amounts of money.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) opened for business this week. The lightning-brief 20-over competition is between eight cities, each side stuffed with international stars and, in case you have missed the point, it involves hallucinogenic sums of money.

It was Chennai (formerly Madras) that bought Dhoni. The franchise - hideous term - cost £47million and it is owned by India Cements. They have spent a little more than £3million on players, including Matthew Hayden and Mike Hussey, of Australia, Muttiah Muralitharan, of Sri Lanka, and Makhaya Ntini, of South Africa. Money money money money money money, as the song in Cabaret continues. Really rather frightfully vulgar, don't you think? India is treating its newfound prosperity like Viv Nicholson, the Sixties pools winner who vowed to spend spend spend. That all ended in tears, of course.

I think most of us who like sport are a trifle uneasy about this. The IPL has been launched as a celebration of money. The sport itself has come a poor second. But are we right to have these reservations? Are we harking back to the outmoded hypocrisies of amateurism? Are we being a bit prudish? Are we shutting our eyes to facts? Are we saying that there is one law for football and England and quite another for cricket and the Third World?

I'll tell you something important about sport: whoever you are and whatever you are trying to do, money doesn't half help. Killer stat: in 1996, at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Britain won one gold medal and finished 36th in the medals table. In Sydney four years later, Britain won 11 gold medals and finished tenth. Why? Sydney was Britain's first post-lottery games. If you can allow your elite athletes to be fully professional and give them the best training facilities, coaches, nutritionists and medics, the chances of improving performance are pretty good.

The England cricket team - the Test side, anyway - improved immeasurably when lavish central contracts for top players were introduced in 2000. Rugby union is unrecognisable from the game it left behind in 1995, when they went professional: faster, fitter, stronger, bigger in every way.

In club football, it is demonstrated every week that rich clubs win more than poor clubs. Rich clubs that have massive incomes and superb facilities buy the best players and pay them sums that would make even Dhoni turn pure malachite from envy. They dominate the domestic game. Equality of competition has been deliberately eroded since the 1980s, when home clubs were allowed to keep their own receipts rather than share them with their visitors. At a stroke, the likes of Wimbledon lost their annual payday when they visited Manchester United.

We know all this, yet we dislike the thought that money matters. I remember my naive astonishment at the response of Phil Edmonds, England cricketer and my biography subject, on being dropped from the Test team: “Fifteen hundred quid down the Swanee!”

My colleague, Gabriele Marcotti, views at least some of this distaste for money in sport as a cultural issue. In his book, The Italian Job, he maintains that Italians do not consider football in the same rosy light: it's a job, and the job is winning. We English prefer to view football more as a Lord of the Rings quest, with our favourite players, such as Frodo and Gandalf, battling the forces of darkness for no reason other than that to do so is profoundly and ineffably right.

Steve Davis, the snooker player, once explained his attitude to me: “The money's great. But it's a bonus. It's a brilliant bonus, but all the same, I'd do it for nothing. If the money went out of the game tomorrow, I'd still be playing.” That sounds sort of right to us, yes? There must be money, accepted - but it can't be the No1 motivating factor. Hell, you can tell when it is. Time and again, we have seen England players in all sports playing not for victory and glory, but for their places; for the income. That's when England lose.

Money won't get you genetic ability (yet). It won't buy you the mysterious thing that is the difference between the champions and the brilliantly talented rest. But most certainly, money will allow the individual to become as brilliant as he or she is capable of being. It will allow the nation to develop its talent in the best possible way, allow the club to purchase the best.

Money matters. But others things matter still more. That, I think, is the point here. Money has, in recent years, changed football dramatically, but football is still capable of giving us stirring, moving and profound pieces of sport. When Arsenal play Manchester United, sport is in the ascendancy over money, even if this is a hard-won victory. Fàbregas and Rooney would still do it for nothing.

The appalled reactions to the Premier League's plans for the overseas round, the 39th step, demonstrate something important. Sport can exist perfectly well when money is second on the priority list, but as soon as money becomes first, the sport begins to die.

That's because sport is not an inherently commercial activity, any more than sex. Both can be considered in that light, but not without loss. Sport without the love of the game for its own sake lacks something; something that matters deeply to those of us who watch.

If the IPL is about money first, it will fail. It is now down to the players and the viewing public to find out what has survived the auction. Ditto, the 39th step. Sport must matter for itself, or it is worth nothing: neither morally, nor spiritually, nor commercially.

Can money buy us Pinsent's last ten strokes, Kelly's double gold, Freddie's Ashes, Gerrard in Istanbul, Jonny in Sydney? For that matter, could money buy us Paula in Athens, the England cricket team in Adelaide, the football team against Croatia, Hamilton's last two races, the England rugby team against Wales the other week?

We watch sport for the passion, for the real thing, for the love. Whoring simply doesn't make the Earth move. Without love, sport is a sounding brass, a tinkling cymbal. Roger McGough can have the final say:

The act of love lies somewhere
Between the belly and the mind.
I lost the love some time ago
And I've only the act to grind.