So John Terry’s lovely Dad Terry has been found guilty of dealing cocaine. Thank God England manager Fabio Capello had the sense to relieve Terry Jr of the captaincy for shagging other team members’ wives. Things have come a long way since Sir Bobby Moore.

The Terry family isn’t short of money – son bought father a mansion from his soccer earnings – but in my experience, families that produce appalling offspring are not by any means solely from the Underclass. A middle-class product of public school I knew in advertising did a bit of dealing on the side (despite earning £150,000 a year as a creative); he was the most appalling prat, but I only had to meet his father once to work out why.

Although people like me tend to go on about politics as the prime example of our cultural decadence, Premiership soccer is up there with Westminster when it comes to the sociopath count. Play-acting to get key opponents sent off, diving to get penalties, screaming into the face of linesmen, utter disloyalty to their clubs: not for nothing did Alan Sugar refer to professional footballers as “a shower of shite”. I think he was being unfair to shite.

Fabio Capello is the only man in soccer management setting an example to his charges – who are in truth, almost to a man, children. When Manchester United went out of the Champions’ League to the German side Bayern Munich last month, manager Sir Alex Ferguson produced a disgraceful post-match diatribe against all things German. Almost everything Arsene Wenger of Arsenal says is childish, biased and inflammatory. “Show me a good loser” he remarked last season, “And I’ll show you a loser”. Dear God – what kind of outlook is that?

The only reason society needs laws is because too many folks think they don’t apply to them. When I was a teenager, most people accepted that the obliteration of poverty would wipe out most crime. Fifty years on, it’s clear that the almost exact opposite is true: material comfort corrupts, and massive wealth corrupts absolutely. Madoff, Blankfein, Blair, Maxwell, Mandelson, Ashcroft, the Barclays, Black….the more they have, the more they want.

Cultures are at their best when backs are against the wall, and money is short. This is the medium-term future that awaits us, the Island Race. This future will destroy the soccer Establishment that exists today – along with the old politics, and methods of financing capitalism. We will all be the better for it.