Institutionalised corruption, wholesale cynical cheating by individuals - and nations - by way of endemic doping, bungs and backhanders galore, and matches thrown and rigged. You name it, sport is now riddled with it as it hurtles towards the gutter. 

Once supposedly the cleanest and healthiest way of life, sport was seen as a safe haven for our young people, something which helped keep them out of harm’s way. Not any more.

In football, and most likely other games kids play, that notion has been desecrated almost beyond belief.

The latest horror story to erupt is surely the sickest of all, involving the sexual abuse of youth footballers by depraved coaches.

It is one that has rocked the game and on the admission of new English Football Association (FA) chairman Greg Clarke created the worst crisis in the history of the game in the UK with the scale and severity still to be fully uncovered.

The former multi-club youth coach Barry Bennell, now a 62-year-old convicted paedophile who is at the heart of the scandal, will shortly appear in court charged with eight historic sexual offences. He previously has been jailed three times for a total of 15 years, initially in the United States.

But this is just the initial wave of the veritable tsunami of what is now coming to light and it would be naive to think that this is confined to Britain - or indeed to football.

FIFA's secretary general Fatma Samoura suggests there could well be international ramifications and that similar situations may have taken place globally.

"We are ready to support the FA," she assures us."We are definitely very concerned about the allegations of child abuse in football, a sport which should be the safest place for children".

She acknowledges that it is a problem which could exist around the world "in every country".

In Britain the sordid allegations have been emerging daily, rocking the game to its very core.

In the professional game here more than 20 ex-professional footballers, including two former England internationals, have now come out and said they were abused as youngsters by coaches and the strong suspicion is that it is still going on.

There are even allegations that some clubs knew of the abuse and bought off the families of victims in order to hush it up and protect the image of the game and themselves.

The whole thing surely puts even FIFA's large-scale corruption scandals in the shade.

The FA has now opened its own independent investigation. In under a fortnight the courage of former Crewe Alexandra footballer Andy Woodward, the first player to reveal his painful secret, has not only stunned the game but caused reverberations in world football. He said it was just the tip of the iceberg and this is now proving to be true.

"In the past the old organisations used to protect themselves by keeping quiet," says the FA’s Clarke. 

"That is now completely unacceptable and inappropriate today which is why we have ordered an enquiry. 

"I find it repugnant that people would suppress the reporting of crimes against children to protect their reputation".

There are now eight UK police forces looking at multiple allegations of abuse in youth football with clubs involved including Manchester City, Chelsea, Stoke City, Newcastle United, Peterborough United and especially Crewe Alexandra, where it is believed to have originated with Bennell.

Another one-time coach at Crewe against whom allegations have been made is said to be still in the game.

It is also believed police are examining historic allegations of sexual abuse by coaches in more than a dozen other sports.

Of course sexual abuse by coaches is nothing new. There have been several instances here, and notably in the United States, Canada and Australia over the years, involving sports including gymnastics, athletics, tennis and swimming. These have largely involved young girls rather than boys.

The football situation is reminiscent of show-business’ casting couch syndrome - only with ambitious young boys the target rather than wannabe female film starlets.

Over the years the authorities and the police appear to have turned a blind eye, as they did in the infamous case of now deceased disc jockey Jimmy Savile.

But we in the media must also accept a share of culpability - and gullibility.

Back in the late 1960s and 1970s while working in the provinces many journalists like myself heard of the sordid activities of Savile but were fobbed off at a high level, one police chief telling us: "That’s just old Jimmy. There’s no harm in him".

Similarly there were dark rumours about murky goings-on at football club Crewe, one of several where Bennell was a youth coach. Again, enquiries were ridiculed.

As I say, it would be naive to believe such behaviour was confined to football.

Probably the most infamous case here was that of former Olympic diver Brian Phelps, a bronze medallist at 16 in the 1960 Rome Olympics who in 2008 was jailed for nine years after admitting a string of indecent assault charges against three girls as young as six.

Phelps had been employed by British Gymnastics as a coach and also by Poole Borough Council in Dorset as a diving coach.

Now we await further sickening revelations in football, the once beautiful game which has become the shame game, and can never be the same again.