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There has been much debate about the conflict between the sport in the Olympics over the past few weeks, compared to the alleged ‘sport’ in soccer, prompted by the start of the Premier League season on Saturday.

There’s a problem for a start: August 18^th, for goodness’ sake. If we didn’t live in such a soggy armpit of a country, August 18th would be summertime and that should mean the cricket season.

So the first thing soccer’s moneymen need to do is back off: their relationship with the people who support their clubs is that of a vampire with an innocent and not-very-bright virgin, but even vampires know you can’t just keep on sucking. Sooner or later, things get as dusty as the place George Osborne’s soul should be.

But to the main point: of course the Olympics show soccer players for what they are: spoiled multi-millionaires with few brain cells, no sense of dignity or humility, little idea of fair play, loads and loads of selfishness and petulance, more money than the ability to kick a lump of leather could ever justify in a sane world, all the loyalty of a Kevin Pietersen and the sportsmanship of a two-year-old learning he or she can’t be allowed to win all the time.

But did it really take the Olympics to confirm all that? Did we really not know that Premier League soccer is a stinking morass of greed and corruption?

I wrote about the women’s football during the Olympics – a whole match without anybody rolling around on the ground in supposed agony and then sprinting down the pitch unhurt two seconds later; a whole match without anybody arguing with the referee.

Part of the answer, for soccer, for years, has been to control the wretches on the pitch: if they feign injury or argue with the referee they should be sent off straight away, no questions asked, and their ludicrous ‘wages’ docked. If there’s any doubt about their alleged injury, the answer is simple: if they stay injured, treat them. If they get up and try to play on, send them off. Right away. They’re cheating. They’re trying to win an advantage over their opponents by lying. They’re on £20,000 a week and they’re cheating. They’re on £20,000 a week without any sense of the responsibility that sum brings. Send them off. And then make them stand on a railway platform in their pants.

And the final part of the answer is something else I’ve alluded to before: every week, live on national television, every player earning more than £20,000 a week for a pointless exercise that is entirely useless to society will be required to get down on their knees and declare: “I hereby thank my lucky stars that though I am a cretin, I am able to earn countless millions of pounds for a pointless exercise that is entirely useless to society yet consumes obscene amounts of money. I hereby commit myself to behaving in public in a manner that is entirely commensurate with this good fortune and the high level of public exposure to impressionable people because the least I can do to repay such incredible luck is to conduct myself with good manners, dignity and humility.”

Difficult to enforce, though. Most soccer players wouldn’t understand a word of that.

Talking of which, Frankie Boyle has an old gag to sum it up: “If you put a bullet through Wayne Rooney’s head, the only difference it would make is that he’d make a whistling noise when he runs.”

But it’s not all about the players who earn millions yet get away with cheating and bad behaviour, nor about the people stupid enough to pay the ticket and shirt and satellite TV prices that partly fund the madness.

It’s also about those who find the spectacle repellent: we pay through bank charges necessary to underwrite the massive losses sustained by the ‘clubs’, and now we have to pay through our taxes for the police to enable the matches to take place. A High Court ruling this week said police cannot charge clubs for matchday policing of the area around their stadia. The case was brought by Leeds United, a lower division club these days where policing each game will cost you and I £80,000.

Now that is a disgrace.

Now look. I like music. That’s my leisure pursuit of choice. Can I ask the taxpayer to fund my purchase of CDs, do you think?

Golden oldie

Those of you who know Brother Stents will know that he has been a fully accredited, properly qualified Grumpy Old Man for many, many years. However, I gather from a Brother Who Can Count that dear Stents has now clung onto the twig long enough to make it official: though he has long since fled these shores, he is now of an age to claim his state pension – and who of us would begrudge sending a few shillings across the channel each week to enable this feeble, frail old man to enjoy what few pleasures now remain to him in his dotage? A belated but very sincere happy birthday, old stick, and we await with interest the onset (or, in your case, further development) of pensioners’ Tourette’s.

Talking of which, Brother Hamster offered a fine example of the disease (whereby old ’uns lose the faculty of diplomacy in speech): a senior citizen was introduced to the boyfriend of a grand-daughter, somewhat sensitive about his premature male pattern hair loss. “Hello,” said the pensioner. “My, you’re bald, aren’t you?”