David Foot column: Everyone surely agrees – even those who salivate at the merest hint of titillation – that it has been a thoroughly disturbing week for sport.

Porn-dripping storylines, so graphically documented that we know they must be true, have ceaselessly dominated soccer's red-top consciousness.

The game's sense of decency, nothing to do with pious hypocrisy, has taken a pounding and may need years to recover. Not that every one is suffering – certainly not the lawyers or that dexterous practitioner of soothing spin, Max Clifford, who continues to have the Wags and their kiss-and-tell opportunist friends queuing up at his door.

That brings us, inevitably, to the seedy world of money, with its tarnished coinage and the whole horrid subject that has troubled this column for years.

Exactly half-a-century ago, almost to the day, football in this country was perilously near to a national strike. The Football League and the PFA were in vituperative opposition. It amounted to a hate previously unknown within the game. The players, exasperated by the League's intractable stance, were in no mood for compromise.

They were restricted to a maximum weekly wage of £20, dropping to £17 in the summer months. But they now had in Jimmy Hill an eloquent militant leader to put their painfully overdue case. His first triumph, after many fiery meetings, was to get that maximum wage abolished for ever.

For the players, however, that was no more than a half-time conquest. The League, angry and resentful, were not prepared to give anything else away when it came to the wider issue of contracts. They wanted to debar footballers moving on once their contract had expired. It was time, they argued, that this form of serfdom should end.

The ugly argument rumbled on. Meanwhile, George Eastham – then a famous name in the history of the dispute – wanted to switch from Newcastle to Arsenal and took his case to the High Court. At this distance we have almost forgotten how bitter were the differences and how close it came for the threatened strike to became a reality. The players had public support. Eastham won his case. And it turned into a pretty humiliating defeat for football's establishment in this country. As for the doubters, their deepest fears about the future financial state of the game didn't materialise.

Emotive words like "soccer slavery" at last lost their meaning. Restraints of trade now belong blissfully to the past.

There have been many examples of ruthless and greedy players. Yet, can we wholly blame them? Playing careers were always short and our top players, increasingly surrounded by their advisors, were shown how to enter the market place. The game has come a long way since Jimmy Hill and his battling cohorts put an end to the scandalous £20 a week wage.

I am no economist or expert on the puzzling, unpredictable matter of supply and demand. But the madcap tendencies of the modern game lead only to threatened winding-up orders (there are a number at the moment) and feared extinction for a number when it comes to the end of this season.

Am I alone in admitting my anxiety – not catastrophic but still careering off the projected optimistic course – in the case of Bristol City? The next balance sheet, however much the wherewithal of the chairman offers some hope, is bound to come as a shock. We are not privy to the kind of salaries that Championship players command and can only assume, for example, that current squad members like Evander Sno and Alvaro Saborio don't come cheap. So far, their playing contributions for City have been modest.

At Rovers, the tidy profit made on the sale of Rickie Lambert has not yet been put to much practical use in team-building. One knows the reason, though the fans share that sense of prudence less and less. Paul Trollope, who would doubtless like to see more cash, could be understandably hitting a rough patch.

The so-called January window has been a monumental let-down for many clubs. Players on offer have generated little enthusiasm. The window has hardly been a success, not stimulating the kind of interest and cash that was expected. Many of the managers remain suspicious of the "loan" system.We now wait uncertainly to see how things emerge. Doubtless John Terry, too.