NOTHING, it seems, remains innocent or uncontaminated for long in the dark, satanic mills of English football. If Dante’s Divine Comedy were to be updated an extra circle of hell would have to be added for some of the characters who leech a living from the Premiership. On Monday night we sat down to cheer on the cloth-capped labourers of Sutton United, from the fifth tier of English football, as they faced the aristocrats of Arsenal.

At stake was a place in the quarter-finals of the English FA Cup, the oldest football competition in the world. Some 5,000 people jemmied themselves into Sutton’s tiny Gander Green Lane and were rewarded with a couthy performance from the home side who, in losing 2-0, nonetheless proved worthy opponents for the north London millionaires.

Afterwards Arsene Wenger, Arsenal’s renowned head coach, pledged £50,000 to help Sutton build two classrooms as part of a community youth project. As he was doing this Theo Walcott, one of Arsenal’s most garlanded players, was visiting the home team’s dressing room to pose for pictures with their players and sign their shirts. Walcott’s act of common humanity seemed to have rounded off a rare event in English football where old values of hard work, self-sacrifice and generosity of spirit triumphed over venality and instant gratification. Yet, even before the BBC had dismantled its portable television gantry, we learned that the occasion had already been hijacked by the lure of a quick and easy profit.

At first we had laughed when Sutton United’s reserve goalkeeper, Wayne Shaw, a fellow of Rubenesque proportions was filmed eating a pie near the end of the game. Then we learned that, before the tie, a bookmaker had offered odds of 8-1 that the big chap would eat a pie on camera during the match. Adverts were carried in a newspaper sponsoring non-league Sutton.

Within two days Shaw, in a tearful phone call with his manager, had been forced to resign amid suggestions that the stunt had breached Football Association rules on betting. The Gambling Commission, which licenses and regulates gambling in Britain, said that it too is looking into whether there was any “irregularity in the betting market and establishing whether the operator has met its licence requirement to conduct its business with integrity”.

Thus, long after Wenger’s nobility and Walcott’s humanity and Sutton United’s spirit have been forgotten this brief, romantic encounter will be remembered for the way in which an online betting company seemed to kidnap a dream.

It would have to be online betting, wouldn’t it? The principal firms that operate in this desperate market are a pack of jackals who prey on (mainly) working men when they are at their most vulnerable.

Dozens swoop on those two-hour television time slots that host a game of football, deploying a bewildering assortment of methods to pick the pockets of sleep-walking supporters. In exchange for millions of pounds in sponsorship, professional football allows its most loyal followers to be exploited and picked clean by betting firms at a moment in the week when they are at their most vulnerable: sitting in front of the television screen, a few pints to the good and wielding a smart-phone.

The misery that these firms inflict on working families matters little to the biggest professional football clubs that will stop at nothing to accumulate yet more riches. They justify this by saying that it is required to “remain competitive”.

This was essentially the same sophistry used by the owners of Leicester City FC when they decided to terminate the contract of their charismatic Italian head coach, Claudio Ranieri, the man who had guided this unremarkable Midlands football club to the Premiership title nine months ago. I’ve never met Ranieri but, in a career during which he has managed some of the most famous football clubs in the world, I have never observed him utter a word in anger at an unforgiving press or an opposing manager or player.

In the unremittingly febrile world of international football this is the equivalent of discovering your spouse in flagrante with another partner and inviting them to join you for a cup of tea to discuss the matter like adults.

By guiding Leicester City to the title, Ranieri had to defeat and overcome several giants of the English game, including some of the richest sporting organisations on earth that had been bankrolled by shadowy overseas billionaire investors.

At the beginning of last season the odds against this happening had been set at 5,000-1. In achieving what had previously been considered impossible Leicester City were greeted as heroes all over the world. If Leicester City survive for another 100 years they will never be able to repay what Ranieri did for them last season. Yet, the owners granted him just 297 days before sacking him in humiliating circumstances. In the interim his team of jobbing and workaday professionals had reverted to type and were now struggling at the other end of the league table.

On the back of Ranieri’s expertise as a football coach and ability to coax from the players every ounce of their limited gifts several had become millionaires.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Gary Lineker, Leicester’s most famous former player, voiced his sadness at the decision. “I shed a tear last night for Claudio, for football and for my club.” Football though, is incapable of shedding tears for anyone else. Instead, the men who run this game of the people, this self-styled beautiful game, value only those who can make it more money. Compared to this avaricious beast the UK Conservative Party looks like the Salvation Army.

As in other pursuits once thought of as the exclusive preserve of working people, a degree of gentrification has occurred in football. Yet its core support continues to reside in many of the UK’s working class communities.

Year after year, these families are exploited by their clubs who sell them cheap, come-apart-at-the-seams merchandise and demand more money for the privilege of watching them. We football supporters are happy to be fleeced because we hope in our daft optimism that our money will be used to scout some undiscovered urchin Messi or to tempt a new Maradona of the Carpathians from Dynamo Locomotiv or some such.

Before they became the boutique choices of the modern princes of Araby and Russian oligarchs, these grand old English football clubs were built on the post-war sacrifices of a million families.

The Brylcreemed warriors who wore their colours made them walk tall in a world that patronised and disparaged them and they carefully passed the deposit of faith on to the next generation; a sacred bond.

Immediately following the sacking of Claudio Ranieri another sacked football manager, the former Spurs head coach, Tim Sherwood, said that the only loyalty in football existed among the supporters, not among owners, managers or players.

Ours is a blind and stupid loyalty, though.