GREED has been the most potent currency of world sport in recent years. Ordinary fans of football, rugby, cricket, athletics, boxing, and golf know this better than most, for greed has denied them sight of the best contests.

Since the most treasured sporting icons have been sold off to the satellite moguls, only the well-heeled can afford to watch on television.

Having been driven from watching live football because season ticket prices have entered the fantasy league, they now must endure the threat of their teams being purchased by entrepreneurs with a love of stock options, dividends, and profits, but not the beautiful game.

Rugby's problems - directly the consequence of Rupert Murdoch's malign influence - are a salutory lesson on how easily and quickly greed can tear down an institutional bastion.

Rupert's ravages have changed the game radically, instrumental in bringing the SRU to the brink of collapse, all but destroying our club game, and making it harder for ''real'' Scots to win caps in the face of mercenaries returning from dubious exile to serve under a flag of convenience in Murrayfield's empty acres.

Entry to events, most notably in golf, can often be determined by such as Mark McComack's agency - if you are one of his company's clients, you may play, while pay-per-view is now boxing's norm for world title fights.

TV now controls football, rugby, and boxing, and has its teeth firmly into golf. Believe this - when all major sport has been devoured by the rapacious maw of satellite, priced off terrestrial TV by so-called market forces, and abetted by politicians promoted to office by the same media interests, then all the best events will be pay-per-view, and through the nose. Sport will be dead, and exclusive only to the wealthy.

It is ironic that the same International Olympic Committee which is squirming over corruption allegations has rejected - for now - the blandishments of satellite TV in order to project their event on public channels worldwide.

The Olympics belong to humanity, but it is only the greatest show on earth because it can be seen to be so. Thus goes the philosophy of the IOC president, Juan Antonio Samaranch.

All of which makes this week's skirmishing between the world bodies of football and athletics particularly significant, and not just for students of the chess of sports politics. Those who love sport for its own sake deserve to know why they are being shafted, and how, and why even, the Olympic Games could soon be at risk.

The FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, in attempting to double football's revenue by threatening a two-yearly World Cup, has triggered a chain reaction. A biennial World Cup following the present schedule would put it in Olympic year. This does not appeal to Samaranch who apparently warned Blatter to keep off his turf, suggesting an alternative schedule, probably starting in 2009, falling in the same summers as the current two-yearly World Athletics Championships.

Samaranch reckoned without Primo Nebiolo, Machiavellian president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation. The Italian has warned that if FIFA should proceed with its plan, athletics will challenge the Olympics head-on.

Georgio Reineri, the IAAF spokesman, confirms that they could protect the integrity and exclusivity of their championships by ensuring it monopolises the best athletes. ''We could allow only athletes of 23 and under to compete in the Olympics,'' said Reineri. ''Then, only the World Athletics Championships would have the best athletes.''

He confirmed the IAAF could switch their championships from odd years to even ones to prevent any clash with the World Cup, thus putting it in the same year as the Olympics whose existence is utterly dependent on revenue from TV. That income would plummet without the best competitors from the marquee sport of athletics. So would IOC marketing revenue from sponsors.

Nebiolo, of course, no less culpable in being motivated by maximising profits, recently made his sport's championship two-yearly.

The attritional effect on the bodies of athletes and footballers, sacrificed on the altar of Mammon, seems not to have rated a thought. Nor have the interests of fans, whose money makes it all possible.

Blatter will probably come to his senses, and the World Cup may remain four-yearly. Or what about the Olympics every two years? The only certainty is that spectators will continue to be ripped off.