James Lawton: The point about West Ham is that a league that doesn't enforce its rules is no league at all

With exemplary footwork, Wigan Athletic's chairman David Whelan has not only brilliantly ushered the Premiership back into the dock over its scarcely believable decision in the West Ham affair. Simply by saying that whatever the fate of his own club over the next two matches he will continue to back the six-club coalition planning legal action, he has also averted what otherwise would have been an inevitable impression.

You know how it goes well enough: the only time a football tycoon generates a breath of moral indignation is when he identifies an attack on his own back pocket.

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So it followed that in claiming so vehemently that the Premiership grossly ignored its responsibilities by failing to dock West Ham points over their illegal, and ultimately duplicitous, behaviour in the signing of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano, Whelan was inevitably seen to be steeped in self-interest. Would this massive football investor have been so zealously involved in the controversy if his team had not slipped down several notches from their efforts in recent seasons and fallen into the relegation danger zone? Only Whelan can reflect on the true answer to the question but in the meantime he has certainly done the next best thing by publicly committing to press on with the fight come what may.

The Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore, who never ceases to say that he works for the strongest, richest, most exciting, you name it, football league in the world, has already tried unsuccessfully to head off the outrage of clubs such as Wigan, Charlton, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United and Fulham, Now, thanks to Whelan, we are seeing exactly how counter-productive his effort has been.

Fining West Ham a mere £5.5m over an issue that should, in any properly run league, have automatically cost them points and the £35m-plus loss of Premiership revenue, and then saying that components of the decision were compassion for West Ham fans and innocent new ownership has already provoked a flood of anger and ridicule.

How could it be otherwise? The decision was so rank it forces you back to the most basic definition of the word league: an association formed to help and protect the interests of its members. That is all members, all levels of investment in the product and whatever the extent of any club's passionate support.

What Scudamore seems not to have grasped, and he really should have done as the working head of a multi-billion pound industry, is a league without enforced rules is not really a league at all. It is a devil-eat-the-hindmost rabble lost in compromise and arbitrary decisions about what constitutes right and wrong and what can begin to represent workable justice.

However, depending on the success of the campaign, which has been taken up with such force by Whelan, it could just be that the Tevez-Mascherano deal, while always giving off the scent of a dead fish, could prove that even a wind carrying such odour might just blow in a little good. It might provide a little much-needed illumination on the quality of football administration in this country - and might also bring a little check and balance to what, according to a growing consensus, is considered the inevitable takeover by the Premiership of all authority at the top level of the English game, including international football.

This development, if only on the basis of the West Ham matter and more than a decade of countenancing a transfer system so sloppy, so open to corruption, that officials of the rigorously administered American professional sports scene still gasp when it is explained to them, is something that surely demands shrieks of resistance.

The Football Association, you may say, are perhaps not always paragons of administrative lucidity, and on recent evidence you perhaps wouldn't trust them to appoint a Soho Square traffic warden, but they do represent a degree of independence, a sense that football isn't entirely about the big league and its profits, and for this alone deserve to be preserved.

Yes, of course, we are on distinctly shifting ground here. It was, after all, the Football Association who came up with the most ringing endorsement of the bawling Premiership infant 15 years ago. The package was wrapped up in bows and presented as a streamlined quantum leap for the game. Quality would reign. The top league would be cut to 18 clubs. Coaches would have more time to develop the skills of their young players.

It was a fiction: The Premiership was, and remains, about money - and the convenience of the great paymaster Rupert Murdoch. The family-man fan has been squeezed until his pips squeak. It has become the hunting ground of foreign investors. A moral dilemma might as well be some obscure defensive formation.

Against this background, West Ham's Icelandic owner, Eggert Magnusson, argues confidently that his club should escape any further punishment because there was no recommendation for punishment to support unprecedented charges. It is appalling nicety. It has been a fact since the gas-lit days that you cannot play footballers who have not been properly registered. Poor little Bury were ejected recently from the FA Cup because they made the mistake. They were shattered but knew they had no recourse in law.

In the Premiership, we are told, no such rigours apply. The Premier League makes its rules as it goes along. It digs into a ragbag of expediency.

Whelan is right to rally the protesters - and to refuse to let it go. He is saying that a league, any league, has to have a set of values and the power to enforce them. The alternative is to let the gangsters in. And we couldn't have that, could we?

Much to admire in Ferguson's grace in defeat and dedicated show of respect

On possibly the worst night of his football life, at least since he became a giant in the game, Sir Alex Ferguson mustered a striking level of grace and, let's be frank, a style in defeat that he hasn't always displayed.

After Jose Mourinho's whining departure from Anfield, Ferguson 24 hours later was giving Milan generous credit for a superb performance. It also represented a perfect counterpoint to the post-game demeanour of his bitter rival Arsène Wenger after Arsenal's defeat by Barcelona last spring.

However disappointed he was with the performance of his own team - and, when you thought about, was it so much worse than that of Chelsea, who Mourinho so crassly claimed to be the best team in a drabbest of matches the night before? - Ferguson praised the individual brilliance and the teamwork of his conquerors Milan.

More impressive still, if less suprising, however, was the Manchester United manager's apperance at Winchester Cathedral for the funeral of Alan Ball - just 12 hours after the shattering denoument in San Siro.

Fergie could have pleaded difficult logistics - and the need to repair his team in time for today's potentially decisive Premiership game against Manchester City. He could have sent his condolences with United director and Ball's England team-mate Sir Bobby Charlton. But no, and inevitably, he was there paying his respects to the hero of a day of English glory calculated to bruise the soul of any Scottish football man.

Winchester Cathedral, a little Catholic church in Doncaster, where he attended the funeral of Billy Bremner on the morning after another European adventure, or some little kirk or parlour back home for a football man, maybe a faithful scout or a second team trainer, it doesn't seem to matter to Ferguson. When he went to Bremner's funeral he didn't get a seat. He stood among the people who who had come to remember a ferociously brilliant Leeds United and Scotland midfielder - and then he swept back to business on the other side of the Pennines.

It is an aspect of Ferguson's nature which certainly gives some light to the bare image of a man obsessed with winning - and gaining an advantage over anyone who steps in his path. It is an enactment of passionate loyalties, not only to his family and friends and his football club but all those he has come to admire.

Ball, no doubt, was one of them. He was a star who represented the enemy but we can be sure neither of these facts were balanced when Sir Alex Ferguson went directly from San Siro to a different kind of sadness in the old cathedral. Ball was a great player who loved football - and that was the lure.