High life | 25 October 2012

A Greek football team has been warned it will be kicked off the field if its players wear uniforms advertising its two new sponsors. The shirts have been bright pink since the team was founded, and bear the names of local brothels ‘Villa Erotica’ and ‘Soula’s House of History’. The hypocrisy involved is mind-boggling. Football in Greece has been as corrupt an institution as Greek politics, with referees known to have taken bribes still on the field, and owners of major teams who have offered such bribes still in the front office. Now a struggling team of amateurs manages to secure sponsorship and some fat guy in Athens gets on his high horse and threatens to disqualify the amateurs for advertising a brothel. What is the world coming to when a team can’t be sponsored by the world’s oldest profession?

I’ve never visited Villa Erotica but was a regular visitor of Chez Lapin, a wonderful old brothel of a nightclub in old Piraeus, which came to mind reading about Patrick Leigh Fermor and the ‘louche and delinquent dockside tavernas’ two weeks ago in The Spectator.