CONSISTENCY HAS NEVER BEEN football’s forte and this has never been more true now that the dangerous liaisons between the sport and bookmakers are more intense. On the one hand, we are beset with stories of betting rings allegedly fixing games everywhere from Belgium to Germany and from Poland to Greece; on the other, clubs still happily take money from the bookmaking industry. AC Milan, Middlesbrough, Tottenham Hotspur, AS Monaco, Seville and the entire Portuguese first division are sponsored by gambling activities.

Some see gambling as innocuous, others as the spawn of the devil. Frédéric Kanouté, the former West Ham United striker now at Seville, was so incensed by his club’s shirt sponsor that he covered up the logo in the first two matches this season, adding that “gambling is the work of Satan. It is forbidden by the Koran and I will not play in a shirt that promotes it.” He backed down after the sponsor reportedly agreed to donate money to a charity of Kanouté’s choice. Yet leaving aside personal values — religious or otherwise — there is reason to be concerned.

Last week Morris Carrozzieri, the Atalanta defender, and Francesco Flachi, the Sampdoria striker, were suspended for two months for violating Serie A’s draconian betting rules, which bar players from betting on any kind of sporting activity. The pair did not place any bets on football. Rather, they were friendly with a well-known bookmaker, which was enough for magistrates to tap their mobile phones. They found that both had rung former team- mates to get information from other clubs.

Flachi’s case is particularly amusing. Before the 2004-05 Rome derby, he phoned Fabio Bazzani, the Lazio striker, to inquire about the mood in the camp. At the time, AS Roma and Lazio were doing badly and each needed a point from the derby. Bazzani allegedly said: “We both need a point, so logically I would think that if it’s level at half-time, we’ll settle for a draw. The only problem is that f***ing Fascist ****, he wants to win at all costs and if he thinks we’re settling for a draw, he’ll go mental and send the Ultras round to training the next day.”

The “Fascist ****” in question was Paolo Di Canio, the Lazio captain and another former West Ham player — and, at the very least, it is encouraging that some people are still willing to put up a fight at the first sign of collusion.

Yet the question remains: when does a phone call to a friend become — as the prosecutors put it — an “illegal attempt to glean information to be passed on to a third party for the purposes of sports betting”? Short of setting up a call centre filled with people listening to every footballer’s conversation, how does one even police this? A logical first step might be to bar players and club officials from betting on football altogether. At the moment, FA rules prevent players from placing bets on matches in which they have inside knowledge, but the next step should be discouraging them from associating with bookmakers at all.

The potential for impropriety is enormous. What happens if a player or club official racks up enormous debts and a bookie agrees to extend his line of credit in exchange for inside information? Could we trust a league to behave with the necessary integrity if the bookmaker who sponsors it is in a hole late in the season, needing results to go a certain way to avoid a big financial loss? Betting and gambling on sport is legal and whether you decide to partake in it is a personal choice. Yet football has a duty and a responsibility not to put itself in potentially compromising situations in exchange for a few million pounds’ worth of sponsorship. Otherwise, the risk is to end up like racing: a “sport” that seems to exist solely for the benefit of bookies and punters.

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