In a stunning display of moral fibre that has left the global footballing establishment scrambling for their smelling salts, Fifa has actually done the decent thing. They have paid Somali referee Artan his full World Cup fee, despite the fact that, through no fault of his own, he officiated precisely zero matches. This is a gesture so profoundly British in its adherence to fair play that one half expects the FA to spontaneously erect a statue of the man outside Wembley, cast from the melted-down medals of less deserving officials.
Let us pause to savour the absurdity. Artan, a man whose very presence on the pitch would have been a triumphant middle finger to global inequality, was denied the opportunity to blow his whistle because of a bureaucratic shambles that would make a Gainsborough painting look organised. Yet rather than telling him to sod off with a pittance, Fifa, that fortress of festering corruption, has coughed up the full whack. It is a move so out of character that I momentarily suspected a prank by the Guardian's sports desk.
This is not merely a story about money. It is a parable about the peculiar British obsession with being seen to be fair, even when the universe is screaming at us to be anything but. We are a nation that will queue politely for hours as a bomb disposal robot trundles past. We apologise to furniture. And now we have a football governing body, headquartered in Zurich but clearly taking its moral cues from the village green cricket club, paying a man for work he did not do because it was not his fault he could not do it.
Artan, the sombre-faced official from Mogadishu, becomes an unlikely hero in this pantomime. He is the stoic Everyman who turned up, didn't get to play, but still got paid. It is the quiet dignity of the underdog winning by default. The Somali Football Federation, no doubt accustomed to being treated like the embarrassing relative at the World Cup family gathering, must be pinching themselves. One imagines their president is currently drafting a thank-you note to Infantino on parchment made from the tears of cynical journalists.
But let us not get too misty-eyed. This gesture, while noble, is also a brilliant piece of PR. Fifa, a organisation whose moral compass spins more wildly than a drunk darts player, has managed to look benevolent while spending a relatively paltry sum. It is the cheapest act of virtue-signalling since a politician kissed a baby in a marginal seat. And yet, in a world where justice is as rare as an honest politician, we must clutch at these tiny straws.
The real story here is what it says about the British sense of fair play. We import it, we bottle it, we wrap it in Union Jacks and serve it to the world as proof of our innate decency. Artan's full fee becomes a symbol of something that does not exist elsewhere. In other countries, he would have been told to take the train home and not let the door hit him. But here, in the strange parallel universe where football's rulers occasionally remember they are human, decency prevailed.
So raise a glass of warm gin (the only kind). Salute Artan, the ghost referee, the silent whistle, the man who got paid for doing nothing except being in the right place at the wrong time. He is the patron saint of all those who have ever been promised a World Cup and then handed a consolation prize. And if this is the future of football, a game where fair play wins over finance, then perhaps, just perhaps, there is hope for us all. Or at least a decent headline.
