Fifa ho hum, I smell much bigger scum

WHAT'S a really naughty four-letter word starting with "F" that you should never use in polite company?

Fifa - once the ultimate old boy's club and reeking of entrenched power and prestige - is now the poster child for an institution fallen from grace.

In fact, as far as institutions go, it is not much further up the pecking order than the sort that sports large locks, thick bars and razor wire.

This should make it a rather smooth transition when big numbers of Fifa executives eventually move from the board room to the slammer.

It may be many years before that happens, and in that time lawyers will have got fat from the trough that accompanies any combination of corporate scandal and justice.

Although it may prove hard to recover the millions alleged to have disappeared into the pockets of Fifa execs, we can take comfort knowing that weighty wads of it will end up in the large hands of their legal teams.

The final word on all things football-related, Fifa nets around $1.3 billion annually.

Greed and its evil spawn, corruption, are among humanity's most ugly characteristics and are so often found among those who would still be parking the Ferrari in front of the ocean-side mansion even if they played by the rules.

But I digress. Before I devoted a few hundred words to Fifa by way of intro, I intended to cut straight to the question that is foremost in my mind over this issue: how much do we really care about this?

I am not a football follower, preferring instead to focus my limited sport-related attention span on our "national game", rugby.

But I do understand that for many, football is like a religion and the corruption scandal might be to them like finding out Jesus and his disciples had been pinching pennies from the collection plate.

It is just that I didn't think the same people who felt this way about football were also the sort inclined to tune in and watch the 6pm news (and every other bulletin, newsfeed, front page, back page and every other page in between).

With the exception of that other highly significant news item - "Caitlyn" Jenner's gender reinvention - the Fifa story is dominating world headlines this week, and while I don't deny the merits of the story, I can't help but question the continuing prominence of it.

When I ran this thought past my husband (sorry, I simply had to slip that word in) he assured me that the story was absolutely as big as it was being made out to be. And this from a man who has no interest in football.

But although many hundreds of millions of dollars are in question, I couldn't help but wonder if this really was the world's biggest corruption scandal going down right now.

Without doubt, palms are being greased globally with much larger amounts, and with money sucked from the souls of the poor in embattled and politically unstable nations, instead of from the coffers of big budget sponsors and advertisers who can afford to misplace a penny or two (hundred million).

Should the world's spotlight be on the money stolen from the rich by the super rich, or from the poor by the corrupt political "leaders" entrusted to use it for the betterment of their people?