The Chelsea captain may have been exonerated, but the image of the English game has suffered grievous damage, writes DANIEL TAYLOR

AT TIMES, it has felt as though football has morphed into The Jerry Springer Show, only with London accents and no bleeping out the swear words.

John Terry was in court because, by his own admission, he had used the words “f**k off, f**k off . . . f**king black c**t, f**king knobhead” during a row with Anton Ferdinand when Chelsea played QPR last October. Except Terry’s argument was that he said “f**k off, f**k off . . . f**king black c**t? F**king knobhead.”

It was all about that question mark, Terry argued – “sarcastic exclamation”, in shocked response to being accused of racial abuse.

The chief magistrate, Howard Riddle, cleared him and Terry was spared a conviction that could feasibly have finished his career and condemned him to a reputation he would never shake.

Even in the football bubble, where they so often appear to make up the rules as they go along, a guilty verdict would have left Terry, already a hugely divisive figure, as one of the most reviled men in sport. His England career would have been finished automatically and there would have been serious questions for Chelsea given that article 6.5 of the club’s official charter promises “a zero-tolerance policy towards discrimination”.

Chelsea runs a strong anti-racism campaign behind the scenes and a conviction would have left them with little option, under their own statutes, but to give strong consideration to terminating his contract or risk being accused of housing a racist.

Had it been a guy in the office, or someone in the crowd, it would have been a straightforward sacking or lifetime ban.

Yet Chelsea always stuck by Terry, the man whose contribution to the club is recognised by the “Captain, Leader, Legend” banner that permanently hangs in Stamford Bridge.

“It would have been usual for an employee in Terry’s position to have been suspended pending the investigation,” Tom Flanagan, head of employment law at Irwin Mitchell, says. “He could have been disciplined, even dismissed, for bringing the club into disrepute, whether or not guilty of the charge in the criminal case, and whether or not the case had even been heard.”

Football, according to Flanagan, “sometimes appears to cocoon itself from the real world”, and it is difficult to disagree after sitting through some of the low points at Westminster magistrates court and trying to imagine what they must make of it in those countries that generally look up to the Premier League.

The whole of professional football in England should be blushing. Never before has a court case gone into such forensic detail of what really happens during an elite-level match and when it was all laid bare the bottom line is that it was embarrassing, damaging and, very often, excruciating. Terry may consider it a victory of sorts, but the sport as a whole has suffered grievous damage.

In graphic detail, we learned the chain of events that had led to Terry being stripped of the England captaincy, with two players arguing over a penalty, swapping insults and one of them pretending the other had bad breath.

Who, seriously, could have imagined that the 10-month investigation that accounted for, among other things, the resignation of the England manager, Fabio Capello, started with something as trivial as Terry wafting his hand in front of his nose, scrunching up his face and feigning disgust, as if someone at the back of the class had let off a stink-bomb? Terry’s explanation was that there wasn’t really one. “It was just something I done.”

Then remember that since making his allegation Ferdinand has received a bullet in the post and a letter telling him he will be shot. His brother, Rio, has suffered his own consequences, missing out on a place in the Euro 2012 squad when the strong suspicion was that Capello’s replacement, Roy Hodgson, decided he could not pick both him and Terry.

Rio, another former England captain, did not attend a single minute of the trial but, in another sense, he was always there. His 3-million-strong Twitter following have been treated to his “Film of the Day” this week. On the first day of the trial, it was Liar Liar. On day two it was A Cock and Bull Story. We got the message.

More than anything, football just came across as astonishingly petty and childish. Knowing what we do of this “lol” generation, it won’t be long presumably before the first Premier League player takes it upon himself to celebrate a goal with what is now known as the “slow fist-pump”.

For those who can’t picture it, this was the part when Ferdinand took a step back from the witness box and demonstrated how he had reminded Terry that before calling another player “a c**t” he should take a long, hard look at himself. Imagine someone dealing out the cards on a poker table; only harder, faster, with a clenched fist.

“A shag”, Ferdinand explained when asked what the gesture meant. In this case, Terry’s alleged affair with Vanessa Perroncel, the former partner of his ex-Chelsea team-mate Wayne Bridge. “How can you call me a c**t?” Ferdinand had shouted at Terry. “You shagged your team-mate’s missus, you’re the c**t.”

There was only one occasion, during five days of almost relentless effing and jeffing, when any form of censorship was applied and that was when the prosecutor, Duncan Penny, asked Terry whether he would have repeated “the N-word” if he had heard that, too. “I’m not going to say it,” Penny explained. “Even in court, it’s so offensive.” The answer, incidentally, was yes.

Hearing the various exchanges dissected in these surroundings brought home just how trashy and puerile it all was. The one thing Terry and Ferdinand agreed upon was that being called “a c**t” was almost mandatory in football.

As well as the “shagging Bridge’s missus” stuff, Terry said he had regularly heard his mother, Sue, being called “a slag”, sometimes from fellow players, sometimes from 40,000 people.

“My mum dated a guy from Liverpool for a while,” he said. “The Liverpool fans made up a song that my mum ‘loves Scouse c**k’.”

The average football match was depicted as a hateful place, where the crowds look for weakness and then attack with a zombie mentality. Nobody, in truth, came out of this well and, ultimately, the case of Regina versus John Terry was one of the low points of the sport’s modern era. On day two, Terry said he felt like “the victim – stitched up good and proper”. By day five, he had got the best result of his professional life.

In the process, the whole of English football had suffered.