The stench of corruption that is emerging at Fifa is deeply shocking. It’s a terrible thing that this wonderful sport with its roots in this country has become such a corrupt business on the international stage.

Football was played in mediaeval times here and it has to be said that it was not always a peaceable game. There’s an account from 1280 in which a player was killed as a result of running against an opposing player's dagger in Ashington, Northumberland. This confirms that by the 13th century kicking ball games were being played in England. It was not terribly popular with the church: in 1531 a Puritan preacher named Thomas Eliot argued that football caused "beastly fury and extreme violence". In 1572 the Bishop of Rochester demanded a new campaign to suppress this "evil game". In 1589, Hugh Case and William Shurlock were fined two shillings for playing football in a cemetery during the vicar's sermon. Ten years later a group of men in a village in Essex were fined for playing football on a Sunday.

However, by the nineteenth century football had become respectable with Thomas Arnold, the famous Headmaster of Rugby, arguing that games like football provided a ‘formidable vehicle for character building’. In fact, many of today’s leading clubs were founded as Church organisations. For example, Everton was founded in 1879 when St Domingo's Church held a meeting - they already had a cricket team but wanted to find another sport for the winter months. The St. Domingo team won their first game against St Peter's Church and the following year the club was renamed Everton after the surrounding area. Other clubs with church origins include Manchester City, Aston Villa, Bolton Wanderers, Birmingham City, Southampton and Tottenham Hotspur.

The popularity of football has meant that it has become a very big international business. There is mercifully little corruption in this country in sport – or anything else for that matter. I hope it will stay that way but we cannot take this for granted and need to guard against corruption. We talk of people being ‘a good sport’ which essentially means that he or she upholds Christian values. Long may sportsmanship be a characteristic of the way in which we are with one another in this country, in football and everything else.