Sport is more than the act of making a score. Because it involves competition - winning or losing - sport requires standards. For ease of expression we use the word sportsmanship, meaning fair play and respect for the rules.

A more sensitive expression is ethics. Sport requires adherence to an ethical code, a collective agreement that certain things are bad and certain things are good. Breaking the code must invite some form of punishment.

So often over the years sport has been a reliable reflection of what is going on in the world around us. The sickness of the Soviet system was glaringly obvious in the mass doping of Eastern Bloc athletes during the 1960s and 1970s.

Old-style European dominance of the Olympic movement led to its moral decay: a history of turning a blind eye to doping, followed by inherent corruption among its sprawling family of IOC delegates. All this happened while Europe went about creating the mother-of-all-bureaucracies in the European Commission. Just as the end result of the EU project was financial decay and near collapse of the European banking system, so we see today in FIFA the same pig-headed anti-sportsmanship that is destroying the moral fibre of football.

The latest example of this could be called the Suarez Moment. Let's look at the facts. Luis Suarez, the Uruguayan striker, deliberately broke the rules of football by using his hands to block a goal shot by Ghana in the World Cup finals. For this deliberate foul he received a red card and was sent off. Under the rules he suffered an automatic suspension of one game. But for Suarez's deliberate foul, Ghana would probably have won the match and advanced as the only African team into the quarter finals.

After the match Suarez boasted that his deliberate foul was the successor to another famous deliberate foul - Diego Maradona's so-called "Hand of God" blocking of an English goal shot in the 1986 World Cup. In other words Suarez proclaimed it was acceptable to deliberately break the rules and deny advantage (or victory) to another team that decided to play by the rules.

Observers upset by this invitation to cheat - why label it otherwise? - called on the FIFA disciplinary committee to set an example by extending Suarez's suspension. This would send a clear message - football's rules, and its ethics (if such exist anymore under FIFA's tutelage) require respect.

And what did FIFA do? Did it suspend Suarez for the rest of the World Cup? Hardly. The committee confirmed Suarez's suspension for a single match. Thank you, FIFA. I think we know where your sympathies lie. After all, how much extra broadcasting revenue comes from an African team doing well?

Of course Uruguay's coach Oscar Tabarez threw a tantrum at British journalists' questioning Suarez's actions. In a telling remark that reflects the turpitude of FIFA-style football, he claimed that everything Suarez did was within the laws of the game. Sorry? A deliberate foul is within the laws of the game? There goeth the game, it seems. But wait, there's more.

Tabarez even invoked religion to justify the cheating, saying, "The hand of Suarez is the hand of God and the Virgin Mary - that's how Uruguayans see it."

Even the Devil can quote scripture, as they say.

Let's remind ourselves that the World Cup 2010 is being played in South Africa. As a way of distinguishing between the standards of old Europe and the standards of the modern world, ask yourself this - would Nelson Mandela approve of the Uruguay/FIFA position?

Most of Europe's banks, and some of its sovereign governments, are stony broke. The same could be said for FIFA's ethical standards. How much will Suarez and Oscar Tabarez earn from football this year and next?

Cheat, cheat, and wallow in money.