Even tennis seems to be a victim of rackets

Early in this Wimbledon tournament, more than £1m was placed on one internet betting site on the result of a match between the Austrian Jurgen Melzer and the American Wayne Odesnik. Several leading firms of bookmakers quickly suspended all bets on the match.

Tennis, despite its relatively pure reputation, is particularly susceptible to corruption. Indeed, the only world sports that attract more betting are football - truly the global game - and horse racing. It is probably more easy for a bent player to "throw" a game in tennis than in football. Tennis results can be fixed by just one player with relative ease. Doping has already rendered much international sport a squalid sham; match-fixing threatens to be an even more scandalous and perfidious malignancy.

Televised sport is a mixed blessing. The coverage improves all the time, but often, on commercial channels, viewers are encouraged to bet; they are, indeed, told it is more exciting to watch if you have money on what your are watching. Online technology means betting is fast and easy. Sport and gambling have for long been inextricably connected, and this unfortunate nexus is bound to be ever more corrupting as televised sport reaches ever wider audiences.

Youngsters watching their heroes and heroines on television now become aware from an early age that they are not watching a simple sporting contest; they are also watching a brazenly commercial activity in which people are making, and losing, vast amounts of money. The sums now routinely wagered on sporting events are staggering. Tennis alone attracts many hundreds of millions of pounds in bets each year. The penalties suffered by bent players who are caught fixing games are hardly proportionate: bans of up to three years, and fines of up to £50,000.

The consequences of the growing interdependence between sport and the global betting industry can only be corrosive for the former, and will undoubtedly destroy whatever Corinthian purity that some sports have just about managed to cling to. Around 50 professional tennis matches played in recent years are now under specific suspicion, and are being investigated by one body or another.

For all that, tennis is lily white compared to football, which is and always will be my favourite sport. But when you look hard at its underbelly, you realise just what a festering mess it has become. In football, match-fixing is the least of it. Organised crime and football are sordid bedfellows and, in many countries, people trafficking is becoming a routine part of the game.

In one African city, it is estimated that there are at least 500 illegal football "academies". Talented boys as young as seven are signed by unscrupulous coaches and agents. In effect, they are being purchased as possessions; they are removed from their families and groomed for the professional game, often far away. Many are transported illegally to Europe, ingenuously expecting stardom, success and untold riches. The cruel reality is terribly different: despair and destitution in the back-street slums that degrade so many European cities. Meanwhile, in South America, which still produces the most naturally talented players, unscrupulous and cynical "entrepreneurs" buy the rights to precocious youngsters when they are barely in their teens.

Right across football, but especially at the higher levels, opacity rather than transparency rules. Deals routinely have their "under the table" element. Some of those complicit in this are household names.

Sport is still about endeavour and heroism and fairly-rewarded skill and even, from time to time, nobility rather than eye-gouging, drugs, bungs and false results. We should not necessarily blame the sport itself or even most of the sportsmen for the criminality: sport, after all, holds up a mirror to the wider world.

Most professional sports have become at least partly rotten, and football is probably the most rotten of all. What saddens me most is the relentless diminution of the concept of amateurism. But then, as someone said the other day, sport has become a whore. And whoring is supposed to be the oldest profession of all.