Football as the beautiful game is dead. Jamie Carragher spat on its grave

Spitting is now the scourge of football, the sport’s most offensive act. Worse even than elbowing, foul language, butting, brawling, kung-fu kicking and using your hand to deny England’s brave boys their World Cup destiny. It is the beautiful game’s deadliest of sins. Did I say beautiful game? Rarely a week goes by when football’s big-money age fails to parade its ugliness to a horrified world.

Depositing a trail of saliva on an opponent is hardly a new development – the image of the German player Rudi Völler’s mullet harbouring phlegm from Dutchman Frank Rijkaard during a 1990 World Cup clash lives in the memory. But this week’s uncouth act by Jamie Carragher – who spat through the window of a car carrying a teenager on Sunday after Manchester United’s win against Liverpool – symbolises football’s deterioration into a soulless enterprise.

Spitting is bad enough when directed at a rival player. Directed at football fans, it is far worse. The former Liverpool defender might be a well-paid pundit – although not for much longer if Sky’s suspension turns into a sacking, despite his frantic apologies – but his spitting shame must be seen as the latest symptom of the contempt displayed by the superstars of the modern game for the men, women and children who pay preposterous amounts of money to watch them kick a ball around for an hour and a half each week.

Further evidence of the disappearance of football’s original, Corinthian values was provided by the ugly scenes at West Ham’s new London Stadium on Saturday, when fans stormed the pitch and menaced their directors after losing to Burnley. It was fitting, in its way, that these antics diverted attention from a tribute to the great West Ham captain Bobby Moore, as he more than anyone else epitomised those values and would not recognise today’s game.

In more innocent times, punk rock fans gobbed at their heroes on stage. I remember a spoof “Gob of the month” competition on the 1980s satirical TV show Not the Nine O’Clock News. But much has changed since then, and spitting today gets under so many people’s skin not only because it might transmit infection, but also because it carries a degree of psychological insult and is seen as the ultimate gesture of contempt. While Carragher’s man-of-the-people persona was carefully cultivated, his disgrace is just another reminder of the chasm between Premier League clubs and their fans.

Since there is a mandatory suspension for any player found to have spat at someone during a match, Carragher should, at the very least, be banned from TV for the rest of the season. His actions tell us more than his punditry has to date. It’s a sorry reminder that the game of Moore, Bobby Charlton and Bobby Robson has been hijacked by an arrogant elite.

• Anthony Clavane is a sportswriter and the author of Moving the Goalposts: A Yorkshire Tragedy