This could be the year that sport dies of corruption

Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It’s indifference that’s the killer. Sport can be bubbling with incontinent hatred, poisonous rivalries, ludicrous injustice and the most appalling people doing the most appalling things: but as long as people still care, as long as the sporting arguments still echo, as long as newspapers are read from back to front, then sport’s future is safe.

But now, as we look forward to an Olympic year, a Wimbledon with hot British contenders in the men’s and the women’s competitions for the first time in damn near 50 years, a summer with a thrilling England cricket team, an England rugby team with a fancy new Australian coach and a European football championship in which England aren’t yet a total write-off, we have to wonder if sport will have the same audience when the year is over.

Sport is in trouble as never before, not just because it’s been getting all kinds of stuff wrong, but because the people who watch the stuff are beginning — just beginning — to replace their sense of passionate engagement with a shrugging indifference.