It's time to clean up the beautiful game

With everyone watching the World Cup, fewer people than usual are looking at Wimbledon. This is a pity, as there have been some great games of tennis this week. And, unlike football, the sport is fair. One reason for this is Hawk-Eye, a computer system that tracks the ball and shows where it lands. Another reason is that as many as nine line umpires work on court as part of a team that makes sure the two players obey the rules.

Now let's look at football. During the World Cup, we have three officials trying to control 22 people running hectically around a field. Compared to tennis, it's an absurd situation and the result is increasingly a disaster. Here are a few examples:

1. Luís Fabiano handled the ball twice for Brazil when scoring against the Ivory Coast on June 20, and although millions of people all over the world saw what he had done, the game's governing body, FIFA, pretended that it hadn't.

2. In last Sunday night's game between Mexico and Argentina, everyone but the referee saw that Carlos Tevez was two metres offside for his first goal.

3. Finally, Frank Lampard got a perfectly good goal on Sunday afternoon against Germany, but because the officials didn't see that the ball was behind the line, England were denied a crucial score at a critical stage of the game.

The Ivory Coast and Mexico paid a big price for the dishonesty of two players, and England for the incompetence of an official. If football were fair, each of these situations would have been reviewed immediately using the video we all saw and the goals scored by Fabiano and Tevez would have been disallowed, while Lampard's would have been allowed.

What we've got instead is a situation where FIFA's stubborn refusal to use technology is encouraging cheating. The players no longer respect the officials because they know they can get away with murder. Football is increasingly like life in many places on this planet: filled with anarchy. At a time when people would like sport's ideal of fairness to play a bigger role in real life, real life, with its all its unfairness, is beginning to dominate the "beautiful game".

Why do people love sport? Because they believe everyone has a fair chance of winning. With the help of modern technology, that's how it is now in tennis, rugby, cricket and ice hockey. That's the way it will have to be in football. Soon.