All fans should boo the Uefa anthem from now on

And don't stop there...

Manchester City are being investigated by Uefa over their fans booing the Champions League anthem (Getty Images)

As a consequence of his death 250 years earlier, no one was able to ask George Frederic Handel whether he would object to his master coronation anthem being gently debased and redeployed as the wedge through which footballers are unknowingly coerced into shifting premium Dutch lager and laundering the reputation of a dubious Russian natural gas extraction company.

It’s too late now, but even so, we can comfort ourselves by imagining the great man - who was a canny businessman in his day - might have mentioned its subject, a priest by the name of Zadok, would probably have been inclined to show forgiveness and therefore so should he.

That Man City’s fans had the temerity to disrespect Uefa’s official corporate jingle will no doubt, in the end, also be met with forgiveness by football’s corporate overlords in their Swiss offices, come the official hearing next month. The decision even to bring action at all has been met with such overbearing derision that anything else would see its already plunging reputation nosedive to a place so low only bioluminescent squid can see it.

We must also assume that Uefa chose Handel’s Zadok The Priest as the tune by which to do its centre-circle banner waving and corporate branding entirely because it sounds suitably nice and rousing. That the real life Zadok the Priest’s role in history was the anointing of King Solomon, a chap whose vast wealth and worship of false idols would lead to the crumbling of his kingdom, is purely coincidental.

Whatever Uefa chooses to do, it is already too late to prevent the now inevitable and entirely welcome reaction to a decision so stupid it is almost a work of performance art - which will be a deafening chorus of boos to the Uefa corporate jingle all the way from Manchester to Marseilles and Milan, and long into the future. It is also tempting to hope that the response will have become so ingrained that when a decrepit Prince Charles eventually kneels to receive the coronation crown at Westminster Abbey and the Uefa Champions League Anthem fires up a nation will find itself swept up in Pavlovian chorus of deafening disapproval sufficient to trigger a constitutional crisis.

There are the predictable complications, of the wonderfully entangled type only football can be relied upon consistently to deliver. Man City will go to Uefa to defend its fans right to freedom of expression, their sacred right to boo the Uefa anthem, which they have done so since the moment eighteen months ago that Uefa fined them £49m and sought to prevent them spraying their Abu Dhabi oil wealth all over the footballing pasture, a wealth gleaned by an autocratic Sheikh entirely at the expense of anything that looks even remotely like freedom of speech or any other incidental accoutrement of democracy.

When the whole world with all its variant faults and foibles comes together through sport to worship the one thing that truly unites it - cash - such consequences are inevitable. But that little sideshow shouldn’t detract from the central reality, which is that no incident, large or small, has ever more perfectly cast the need for the type of fundamental reform at the top of football that simply isn’t going to come.

That Uefa really does regard itself as a nation state that football’s ticket-buying untermenschen must respect or face the consequences again tells you everything you already knew. This parlous reality is the realised vision of the men who kidnapped the game. Their deliberate choice.

The fans are there simply to yield to the corporate message, to cheer when they are told, to pay the money (as long as it’s with the approved credit card) and drink the official Kool Aid.

Already there have been several calls to arms to boo the Uefa jingle. Do it, but don’t stop there. Fifa has its own anthem too, by the way, played before every World Cup match since 1994, but which has only ever entered anyone’s actual consciousness when it was played on loop over the livestream for half an hour while the world waited for Sepp Blatter to shuffle up to his lectern and announce his pseudo-resignation.

If your vision for the future of the game is not one in which the World Cup is pushed around the globe, extorting taxpayer’s cash for futureless stadiums so that Coke, McDonald’s and a cabal of Zurich criminals can run off with the profits then boo that too. The time for idolatry has long passed.