The spirit of that judgment, which has never been revised, still informs the law's attitude towards sport in Australia and elsewhere. Legislators tend to look upon sporting bodies as clubs of volunteers whose business mostly is not justiciable (but whose hospitality is delicious). As far as the law is concerned, sport remains a realm of "blazered fiefdoms", as once described by a London lawyer and CAS arbitrator Raj Parker, resonating powerfully right now. This is despite the certainty that sport is an industry, glamorous, rich, vast and as we have been so rudely reminded this week, eminently and endlessly corruptible.

"What many people don't get is that FIFA isn't a business, it's not an international organisation and it's not governmental," explains the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke, a student of sports governance, writing on the website vox.com. "Like many international sporting bodies, including the Olympics, FIFA falls into a netherworld of governance. It's basically a members' club. It's like you and I started up a bowling league in our home town – we got together and decided to govern it ourselves. But it's a members' club that hit the big time."

But, says Pielke, the FIFA trough-snufflers made one gigantic mistake. "They got sloppy," he said. "They violated US laws on US soil, and brought the US government into it."

A Victorian lawyer thinks it is about time Australia put its legal foot down on sport's demesne mentality and the abuse it fosters. Specifically, he thinks Australia should criminalise doping and corruption in sport. John O'Callaghan has read and written widely on justice in sport. In 2002, he spent six weeks in Switzerland, England and Canada on a Churchill scholarship, studying sports courts in those countries and the viability of establishing one here. He made impassioned recommendations to the federal and Victorian sports ministers at the time, but nothing materialised. O'Callaghan is now a magistrate in Wangaratta, but his vocation to bring sport into the real world is undimmed. He believes the reluctance of governments to intervene in sport is partly responsible for the way sports lovers repeatedly feel let down, by players and authorities. As a lifelong St Kilda supporter, he knows the feeling of being let down.

O'Callaghan acknowledges that some forms of malfeasance in sport are on statute books in some jurisdictions already — match-fixing in Victoria, for instance, and doping in several European countries — and are more generally covered by laws against theft and fraud, but laments that there is no specific legislative focus and thrust towards sport. "The biggest impediment to sport in investigating crimes in its midst is resources," he said. "If someone is spread-betting on the national gymnastics championships, or doping to get into the Olympics, it's pretty hard for the gymnastics federation to do much about it."

Criminalisation would bring into play all the investigative powers of law enforcement agencies, O'Callaghan said. Those agencies would be at arm's length from the sports, so less inclined to sweep dirt under the carpet. Criminalisation also would embolden whistleblowers, who otherwise can take their misgivings only to the selfsame superiors whose venality they suspect.

If sports doping had been criminalised in Australia, the Essendon saga, for instance, might have taken on a different complexion. Infamously, the AFL's anti-doping tribunal had no power to summons and question ASADA's three main witnesses, Nima Alavi, Shane Charter and Stephen Dank, leaving only — but attaching little weight to — their records of interview and public statements.

None the less, the tribunal did declare that it "finds that the credibility of each of these principal participants is at a low ebb and each man in acting as he did in his own way and for his own motive saw a golden opportunity to 'feather his own nest'. Their lack of credibility is reflected when their reliability is called into question and the tribunal is satisfied that on a number of important issues, their evidence ... was not only unreliable, but ... dishonest".

Imagine the Essendon case had been heard by a criminal court instead of a sporting tribunal, with the power to subpoena and cross-examine Alavi, Charter and Dank (but governed by a more exacting burden of proof). Whatever the verdict, we would be closer to the truth.

In any case, it is patently clear that the idea of elite sport as "the internal affairs of (a) voluntary association, society or club" is as redundant as it is quaint, and has been for a long time. Arguing just the opposite in the UK last year, a peak body called the Sports and Recreation Alliance said: "When a criminal robs a bank, he doesn't bankrupt the whole company. But a match-fixing scandal at the top of British sport has the potential to be ruinous. If that's not a risk worth managing by prosecuting ... I don't know what is."