Football is still a black and white affair Twenty years after the publication of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, and some 10 after the gentrification of football the book inspired was held to be complete, it is ever more unavoidably clear that, beyond the cosmetic, little has changed. With the same misplaced smugness that once informed their estimations of the England side's tournament prospects, the football authorities, media and general public came to trust in some innate English superiority. Those revolting Neanderthals in Spain, Italy, and the countries of the former Warsaw Pact might make baboon chants and abuse black players with stomach-turning terminology, this foolishness contended, but here we outgrew the vileness long ago. The truth was always otherwise, even if no one can seriously dispute that there has been an improvement. Through the mid-Nineties I went to Stamford Bridge often, though Chelsea is not my club, and it was so reliably horrendous that, looking back, I must have been madder than usual. Eventually, it was the chant (a novel statement of anti-racist intent by some standards) "We all agree / Our coons are better than your coons" that broke the spirit. I did not return for 15 years. When I did, last season, rather less had changed than the mythology contends. The walk to the ground from Fulham Broadway Tube station was the same unnerving field study of bullish necks throbbing away with barely coiled rage beneath prematurely bald heads, and the same air of menace pulsated through the stand. If the manners had become sanitised, palpably this had less to do with any dramatic cultural shift in attitudes than the predominance of CCTV cameras and more intensive policing. The stock medical analogy for any endemic problem of the kind is "a cancer that must be cut out of the game." It could not be more muddle-headed. Racism, like its blood brother thuggery, is not a malignancy that can be excised. It is a chronic, incurable disorder like type 1 diabetes, which can only be managed. The moment the insulin of all the cameras and police surveillance dried up at Stamford Bridge, Elland Road, Anfield or any urban stadium, the nastiness would return. Just as the repugnant John Terry is the most striking paradigm of the Chelsea fan base, and Chelsea a leading emblem for English football, so racism in football stands proxy for racism everywhere. The most ferociously tribal of all sports may be the catalyst that unleashes primitive instincts fans must suppress elsewhere, but ultimately in this context it is nothing more than a mirror on wider society. We have become hooked on congratulating ourselves in contrast to those evil, retrograde continental Europeans, and with some reason. Mass immigration came to Britain earlier, and in larger numbers. But while practice has made us less imperfect than others, it feels a little previous to become complacent until one has been chased down a Burnley back alley by a dozen neo-Nazis screaming "Paki." In a dark and putrid corner of the human soul lies an inherent, congenital fear and hatred of otherness, and for that the only cure is a global programme of compulsory inter-marriage until everyone alive has an indistinguishable genetic make up. In the absence of such a masterplan - and there might be moral objections to the holistic notion of solving this problem with eugenics - this anguished debate will grind interminably on. And as it does so, using one sport as a catch-all garbage can for the putrid will remain as self-defeatingly pointless as Chelsea FC accusing a referee of the offence that has plagued it, and so many clubs, for half a century. The football transfer window will reopen in January, but this particular market in transference cannot be closed too soon.