These are dangerously challenging times, morally challenging even, to be aligning oneself too closely to the hierarchy of Fifa, the disgraced world governing body of football.

The supposed guardians of the most popular sport on Earth are in a right mess; it takes no Rhodes scholar to see that. And the next few days, weeks, months — hopefully not years — may reveal just how deep and murky a mess this really is.

The United States Department of Justice, when it initiated the dawn raid of the five-star Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich on May 27 that led to the arrests of seven high-ranking football officials and indictments for 14 in total, became an instant hero to many who have railed against questionable practices and equally questionable characters at Fifa that have gone largely unchecked for decades.

Even the English who are past masters of habitual anti-American sentiment would have taken a day or two off to raise a glass.

World Cup football is the greatest spectacle on the planet, but events of the past fortnight have attached to it a stench that cannot and should not be easily scrubbed clean. That intoxicating South America, which has brought us the most special teams and most gifted players in the history of the game, is so deeply rooted in the toxic mess is hugely disappointing.

The casual fan knows of the accusations in recent years, even if they have not followed chapter and verse; so, too, those of a more ardent bent.

The morning after the biggest story to rock international sport since the Ben Johnson doping scandal in 1988, a Wall Street Journal editorial began with the headline “Least Surprising Indictment Ever”.

So for the president of the Bermuda Football Association to express surprise at recent events — not once but twice — was a letdown and invites criticism that naive little Bermuda cannot see the forest for the trees.

Let’s be clear here. Nothing should surprise as this dark period in football is brought into the light by law enforcement authorities; absolutely nothing. And it is not as though Bermuda is so disconnected from the power brokers of the world game that we should be taken aback by revelations of bribery, kickbacks and money-laundering — we were, after all, smack-dab in the middle of it in 2011 when Mohammed bin Hammam attempted to bribe members of the Caribbean Football Union, a BFA contingent included.

Bin Hammam, the unseen author of $40,000 “gift packets”, ultimately received the first of two lifetime bans — top effort, that — while the period also proved the beginning of the end for Jack Warner, then the president of Concacaf and a Fifa vice-president.

Bermuda came out of that smelling of roses, and justifiably so. But, as is the case whenever the few spoil it for the many, well-intentioned football administrators the world over are tainted by the news of the day, like it or not. The game is tainted.

It is acceptable to state the good that football does worldwide, but when the wolves are baying for blood — the FBI, DOJ and IRS are not in the business of colluding to bring a case to trial for no reason — introspection rather than deflection should be the advised default position.

Although there have been guilty pleas already in this case of $150 million said to have changed hands fraudulently, it is duly noted that the 14 persons indicted and sought for extradition to face criminal charges in the US are to be presumed innocent.

Still, it should not require the benefit of hindsight to find it wholly inappropriate for Bermuda to be packaged with a group that compares Blatter to Jesus and Nelson Mandela, as Concacaf so brazenly did in April.

Of that group of disciples, one Jeffrey Webb, the Concacaf president and a Fifa vice-president, was the most senior of the executives to be arrested in Zurich last week.

Has Concacaf been tainted by this? Sure it has.

Has Bermuda as a member of Concacaf been tainted as a result, however indirectly? You bet your boots.

So, where to turn for salvation when those put in position to safeguard the interests of football instead bring the game into disrepute? The players, of course. ’Twas ever thus.

So it will be left to the Barcelona trio of Messi, Neymar and Suárez, and the Juventus vanguard of Buffon, Pirlo and Tévez to remind why we fell in love with “the beautiful game” in the first place when the Champions League final takes centre stage in Berlin tomorrow.

But by about 6pm Bermuda time, thoughts should turn fully back to the story that could bring Fifa to its knees before all is said and done. And questions, some harder than those that, admittedly, the BFA has been forthright in answering on this page, will continue to be asked.

It was once said that the media are part of the “football family”. Surely that cannot be so; not if we are doing our jobs.

Andrew Jennings, the indefatigable former BBC and Sunday Times reporter whose pursuit of Fifa draws parallels to David Walsh’s vindicated quest to expose Lance Armstrong, says it best: “This journalism business is easy, you know. You just find some disgraceful, disgustingly corrupt people and you work on it! You have to. That’s what we do.”