As a tiny child, I fell in love with the pageantry and camaraderie of the Eurovision song contest. But my infant innocence was shattered as early as 1969 when, barely 18 months old, I watched Norway’s Kirsti Sparboe crawl criminally into last place with her swinging slice of Carnaby Street pop Oj, Oj, Oj, Så Glad Jeg Skal Bli (Oh, Oh, Oh, So Glad Your Skull Bleeds). From that day forth I no longer believed in the existence of a supposedly just God.

Nonetheless, throughout my adolescence, I followed Eurovision blindly. I made my own Eurovision Top Trumps, carved my own Eurovision chess set (with Terry Wogan as the king), and baked myself a tiny clay Eurovision thong. I chose Eurovision, almost provocatively, over the things an 80s teenage boy was supposed to enjoy, like torn-up pornography in a wood, the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, or football. In retrospect, I have only myself to blame for being kicked into the sixth-form urinal trough every day and then urinated on. And that was just by the teachers!

What an appalling thing football seemed to my youthful, Eurovision-formed sensibilities. And what an appalling thing football has remained. And what strange and self-deluding accommodations football’s followers and practitioners must have to make with their beautiful game’s racism, its violence, its avarice, its sectarianism, its corruption, its misogyny, and its Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton musical.

The world of football is a world in which the phrase “racist orgy” really exists, and genuinely applies to an actual thing that actually happened. The phrase is not just a random meeting of deliberately tasteless words Hadron-collided together in the human subconscious for the sheer sick pleasure of their absurdity, such as paedophile frogspawn, antisemitic wool, or colonic wasps’ nest.

And last week’s football players’ racist orgy wasn’t even spoiled by the racism. On some level, the racism appears to have improved the orgy for the young Leicester sportsmen spreading their international goodwill around in it. It’s as if at some point during the orgy one of the rich football players thought, “What this orgy, already involving an arguably morally dubious power imbalance between millionaires from the developed world and poor Thai women, really needs to make it absolutely perfect is some overt racism!” It is only fair that Leicester City’s mascot, Filbert Fox, is forthwith forced to Patpong to play ping-pong.

But what threatens to finally bring football down is not a racist orgy, but the plain old-fashioned human greed of Fifa, the Football Illegal Funnelling Association. Of course, in retrospect, it’s obvious no just system would award the World Cup to Qatar, a country named after a sinus phlegm blockage, or, worse still, to Russia, which lacks even the distinction of sounding like a mucus-based illness, and which always generates dozens of below-the-line comments from full-time, Kremlin-controlled internet posters, masquerading as annoying Observer readers, whenever I mention it in print and online.

One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed to their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenetic Russian keyboard wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome. Happy now?

Fifa’s decisions may yet be revealed as the result of backhanders as obvious as Chuck Blazer trying to sneak up on an unattended tray of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. But corruption is everywhere. For example, these days, individual Eurovision songs’ respective scores reflect only the shifting geopolitical allegiances or entrenched national prejudices of the voters. And since the high watermark in 96 and 97, of Gina G’s religiously ecstatic Ooh Aah …. Just a Little Bit and the tectonic emotive surge of Katrina and the Waves’ Love Shine a Light, it appears some foreign agent has drugged the infinite number of monkeys we had working on our annual entries.

At the centre of this toxic bubblegum farce lies the laughing, mocking, sneering face of one man, soaked in duplicity like a sin-smeared human pikelet, the Jack Warner of Eurovision, Graham Norton. Surely it can’t have been only on my face that eyebrows were raised when The Graham Norton Show beat my own Comedy Vehicle in the category of best comedy and comedy entertainment programme at last month’s Baftas? A man failing to ask Gary Barlow about tax avoidance and tipping a member of the public out of a chair, better than my artfully crafted work? Surely there was some mistake. And yet this Norton, like Blatter, chose to accept the award as if he deserved it.

Of course, like those of Sepp Blatter, Eurovision’s tentacles are long and covered in suckers, and it is very useful for the organisation to have a public face that brings Bafta-winning credibility to its tawdry TV competition. Just as Sepp Blatter paraded a grieving Nelson Mandela at the 2010 World Cup final in order to ennoble his vile carnival of ball-control, so the presence of Bafta-winning Graham Norton, TV’s Nelson Mandela of celebrity chat, at Eurovision lends the disgusting singing event a legitimacy it no longer deserves.

Eurovision is nothing more than music’s Fifa. But what can be done with the bent football body now? Obviously this discredited organisation can’t be allowed to run a football franchise, but is it right to squander Fifa’s vast infrastructure? On the morning news last Tuesday, a nitrous oxide-eyed Nicky Morgan, currently licking round the rim of the Gove-poisoned chalice of the education secretary post, announced that all “failing” schools would now be made into academies. An ignorantly on-message Morgan was unable to say how many academies are failing, though in September an Ofsted survey of 12 schools run by the Academies Enterprise Trust chain found half of them less than adequate, and she had no suggestion as to who might take these disastrous establishments over.

I think that rescuing failed academy schools is a job for Fifa, whose robust and flexible approach to business and ethics would appear to make them the perfect partner for the messy mallard mating-squabble Morgan’s department clearly proposes for the school system. A good fit for the fundamentalist free-market future being rolled out unopposed by the government, Fifa could be swiftly rebranded as something positive like Faith in Failing Academies and set to work. Worse people than Sepp Blatter have already been sold a stake in the future of your children.