I am beginning to lose the plot.

John Terry, captain of Chelsea and England, is an all-round typical football hero. He has bonked a team mate’s girl friend, demanded cash payment for access to Chelsea’s training facilities (which he donated to charity when he was found out), and has now been accused of racially abusing Anton Ferdinand when Chelsea recently played Queen’s Park Rangers. The allegations are being investigated by the Football Association and the Metropolitan Police.

Terry was caught on camera by the thousands of Premier League fans who have, over the years, become expert lip-readers (especially of words beginning with ‘f’). The racial slur is reported to have been (and I censor the offensive part so as not to repeat the offence) ‘fucking bl*ck cunt’.

In the days before the gross degeneration of language on the football field and elsewhere, and the concomitant and contradictory rise in the expectation of due respect for minorities, the remark would still have been considered offensive. But I would have had to spell it ‘f*cking black c*nt’.

Terry’s defence is that he was taken out of context. And what a context. He says that his exact words were ‘I never said you were a fucking black cunt’. We missed the exculpatory introduction because a team mate happened to pass in front of the cameras and obscure the view of the Premier League’s lip-readers.

Terry’s denial is perhaps predictable. And, as Mandy Rice-Davies said when Lord Astor denied an affair with her, or even knowing her, ‘well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

Not that Mr Ferdinand is any saint. Like all too many professional footballers he tends to get involved in affrays outside nightclubs in the small hours and what he told his then club West Ham was an urgent trip to see his grandma in the Isle of Wight turned out in fact to be his birthday bash in the US.

At the same time, Luis Suarez of Liverpool and Uruguay is also charged by the FA with racially abusing the Manchester United and France fullback Patrice Evra. Suarez, who can score brilliant goals despite a chronic inability to stay on his feet inside the penalty area and whose method of falling down includes an instinctive arm action resembling the brandishing of a card, is reported to have used an abusive term beginning with ‘n’ in both Spanish and English.

Suarez’ defence, made despite an order from the FA for all parties to keep their mouths shut, is that the word he used is not offensive in Uruguay and in any case, other Man U players use it.

Suarez does have a problem with his mouth. He was once suspended for 7 games in the Dutch league for biting an opponent. Probably the equivalent of a kiss in Uruguay, I don’t know.

Now the irony is that professional football is something akin to a workers’ paradise. While the rest of the working world is being laid off, pay-packets cut and pensions slashed, footballers are still doing very nicely.

This must be one of the few industries where generous workers’ salaries constitute by far the largest portion of expenses and where millionaire bosses, who in their day jobs are your normal predatory capitalists, suddenly seem happy to lose millions every Saturday afternoon.

But far from showing any gratitude for this state of affairs, your average footballer cheats, lies, and regularly attempts grievous bodily harm. And on the field of play as well. And why, of all the sports in the world, is football the only one where it appears necessary to snort snot onto the pitch every few minutes?

So we have a coddled elite whose greed is bankrupting their business and whose antics, from the ridiculous to the immoral and criminal, are a tabloid editor’s dream. To put things right we obviously need clear, far-sighted vision from the top.

Instead we have statements that racial abuse is OK as long as you shake hands afterwards from someone who once made himself President of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, who argued that women footballers needed to wear tighter shorts and low-cut shirts, and who said that awarding the World Cup to Qatar, where homosexuality is a crime, would present no problems for gay footballers or spectators as long as they didn’t do it. While wearing suspenders or otherwise.

St*p*d Sw*ss g*t.