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Don't blame the billionaires. Just because they're vulgar, self-aggrandising, possessed of bizarrely skewed values and haven't got the remotest clue about the value of sport, still less its meaning, there's no call to blame them for what they've done to it. Billionaires are like that. No point in expecting them to be like me and you.

As the whole Sir Allen Stanford business goes up in smoke and he becomes the latest billionaire lurking behind an impenetrable thicket of alleged lies, let's not blame poor alleged Sir A for being a monumental power-drunk, publicity-crazed vulgarian who doesn't know a doosra from a nurdle. That's just the way he is.

True, he's alleged to have pulled off one of the greatest alleged frauds of all alleged time, but that's not the thing to worry about here. Alleged conmen are always with us. The truly disturbing fact is the way cricket took Stanford at his own valuation, looking to find a reason to believe and at once discovering it in a gold-plated helicopter and behaviour that made Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney character from the Eighties seem like ironic understatement.

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But it's not just cricket and its alleged leaders who are the problem here. The Stanford debacle - hideous, shaming, humiliating to all concerned - is just another example of the way sport behaves whenever it finds itself in the presence of serious money.

When a billionaire comes a-calling, sport doesn't waste its precious time by saying, “I'm not that kind of girl.” No, one whiff of the inside of a fat wallet and sport is flat on its back with it's legs in the air, shouting: “Come and get it.”

There is a moral confusion at the heart of sport and people such as Stanford can smell it out with the extraordinary and in some ways deeply enviable instincts that make them so good at money.

I am reminded of Ivan Karamazov, the brother who declares that if God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted. If your most cherished belief is to be abandoned, then there are no more prohibitions.

Once, sport's key belief was amateurism. Sports people believed that if you did a thing for money, it was instantly devalued. Sport was pure, set apart from the world, and as such had a moral beauty that was to be guarded at all costs. These beliefs were also, in slightly amended fashion, adopted in the paid sports. It was wrong to pay athletes too much because too great a reward would mean that people would be doing sport for reasons other than sport. And that would never do.

Now amateurism was an ideal that had its heart in hypocrisy and it had to go. It was based on sinecures, dodgy perks and secret payments. W. G. Grace, emblem of all the great British values, was a shamateur of imperial proportions. The whole concept of amateurism went back to the notion of keeping the working classes out of middle-class amusements. Naturally, it went in the end.

But that opened the way to the sporting equivalent of Ivan's Error: if you don't believe in amateurism, then everything is permitted. If it's all right to make money, then it must be important to make as much as possible. The moral compass swung out of control. If money is no longer the supreme evil, then it must be the supreme good. If the point of sport is no longer to do things for the pure sporting beauty of them, then it must be to make as much money as possible.

As amateurism went out of the window, it gradually became possible for more and more sports, more and more athletes, to earn money more or less incidentally. With changes such as the dropping of the maximum wage in football, it became possible for professional players to become almost well-off. As television became an increasing power in sport, so there was more money for all.

Sport found itself trapped between two worlds, between two times, half caught up in the Corinthian values of old, half taken up with the brave new possibilities of money. But then came a series of shocking events - Packer, Bosman, the Los Angeles Olympics, satellite broadcasting, many others - and it was clear that sport could make a great deal more money than it did. It set about putting this right, as if it were nothing less than a moral crusade.

As a result, at the highest level of sport we have people who believe, even if they daren't say so out loud, that sport's prime function is to make money. Sport is no longer incidentally attractive to money; money is now what sport is for. Sport became “the product”, we who watch it became “consumers”. Money justified everything.

It's not that sporting administrators are corrupt, in that they take this money for themselves. Rather, they are corrupt in believing too strongly in the importance of money. If sport is compromised in the pursuit of money, then so what? What is sport for, after all? So sport, with distressing eagerness, has compromised itself in every corner of the Earth.

Cricket was just desperate to be ravished by Stanford. Every sport in the calendar is insanely eager to fling off its clothes the instant that money-men walk into the room. Look anywhere in big-time sport and you find the same pattern. The England cricket team play endless matches, seeking not excellence but money. The money doesn't do any good, of course - it just goes to fund more Kolpak players for the counties - but if you can make money, you should make money and everything else in sport is secondary.

Rugby union brings us its bloated and endless World Cup. Football sacrificed the game itself for the convenience of television; we now settle big matches by penalties instead of football. At the 2008 Olympic Games, the swimming finals were held shortly after breakfast, because that's what American television wanted. Do you think the athletes would have preferred the usual evening finals? We all have to make sacrifices in the name of money and one of the things - perhaps the first thing - sport is prepared to sacrifice is silly old excellence. The Pursuit of Money is the thing, is it not?

And so you can hardly see a professional athlete who is not a billboard, and the notion that this is in any way demeaning has long vanished (outside the United States, anyway). Sport is showbiz, the England cricket team a product and the idea that sport has any meaning or point or relevance is lost. Sport's administrators have no more idea of what sport means than the alleged knight himself.

Now hear a strange fact. Just because you can make money from a situation, it doesn't mean you have to. Say you are a man married to an unspeakably beautiful woman. There is a clear commercial opportunity here: you could rent her out by the hour to billionaires. But perhaps you think that she, perhaps you think that your relationship with her, perhaps you think that the whole concept of marriage, is worth more than quite a lot of money.

Sport has become a whore. Me, I don't blame the clients, the billionaires and the multinationals. I blame the sports administrators who do the selling. The pimps.