Nick Townsend: The Bridge of high farce and misdemeanours

Crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and in the chronicles of great misdemeanours in sport one suspects that Ashley Cole's brief dalliance with Chelsea's principals at a London hotel will not be accorded much more than a footnote.

Crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and in the chronicles of great misdemeanours in sport one suspects that Ashley Cole's brief dalliance with Chelsea's principals at a London hotel will not be accorded much more than a footnote.

Indeed, if the issue had not concerned two major London clubs, and the one found guilty by a Premier League commission were not the recently ordained Premiership champions, managed by the charismatic Jose Mourinho and financed by the mega-wealthy Roman Abramovich, it surely would not have caused the great torrent of cant which has flowed from some quarters.

True, the circumstances have provided a tantalising insight into a deteriorating relationship between the England defender and his club, thanks to the evidence offered by Chelsea's chief executive, Peter Kenyon, that Cole had spoken of a dearth of team spirit, of a lack of leadership by Arsène Wenger and of an Arsenal run by a French clique. That won't be the last of it, either. This story has the legs of Frank Lampard, particularly now that Chelsea's conduct in the recruitment field is again under scrutiny.

That follows the suspension of Tottenham's sporting director, Frank Arnesen, by his club, who have claimed that Chelsea had made an approach to the Dane without their permission. Chelsea have responded by stating that they made an official approach for Arnesen two weeks ago. But it is the Colegate saga that dominates, and despite that epithet, football is finding it difficult to brush away the stain.

Yet it effectively amounts to this: disenchanted employee has informal chat with prospective future employees, during which he has a pop at his current boss and work-mates. There must be similar occurrences thousands of times a day in the real world.

Only in professional football, at this élite level - a surreal parallel universe in which two or three noughts would have to be subtracted from every salary to restore it to something approaching normality - is such contact outlawed. The explanation? To maintain, as far as one can gather, a façade of loyalty on the part of the player in exchange for such rewards. The significance of this case lies in whether that is desirable, let alone practical.

The response from those pronounced guilty has been a wailing at the justice dispensed, and none more so than from the lawyer of Cole, poor lad, who, on top of playing for a club who will pay him only £55,000 a week, has been fined £100,000 for his part in the affair.

As we peruse our tabloid newspapers to find photographs of Cole emerging bleary-eyed from London's Chinawhite nightclub and, elsewhere, Lampard and his fiancée aboard the £72m yacht Pelorus "loaned" to him for a fortnight's holiday by Abramovich, we can be content that the lifestyles of professional footballers are not immediately jeopardised by this Premier League inquiry.

Far from it. For players in the stratosphere, it remains a player's market, and that status may be about to be enhanced; if not to a state where complete freedom of contract is granted, then certainly to a liberalisation of the current regulations, which merely force dealings underground through the network of agents.

In that respect, this has been a curious affair. Instead of the usual masonic requirement for secrecy, the meeting, engineered by Cole's agent, Jonathan Barnett, with the connivance of the "deal-fixer" Pini Zahavi, was so transparent that one wonders why an audience wasn't invited to attend. Why Cole himself was present, only his agent can explain. It may have been arrogance by any or all concerned that the regulations could simply be disregarded. Or was it more considered than that: a desire to expose the rules to contempt?

All involved would deny it; yet that has been the effect as the debate begins in earnest over whether the regulations constitute "restraint of trade", as Cole's representatives - who apparently plan to take the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport - say they do, or whether they should remain intact for the "integrity of the game".

When they handed down their judgement the Premier League commission were damned if they decided upon draconian action against Chelsea, knowing that would provoke the club to go through the courts, and have been damned, principally by Arsenal, because they didn't.

The commission are scornful of Chelsea's claim that they had no intention of signing Cole. However, one could not blame the Chelsea manager if he wasn't distinctly aggrieved that Liverpool's then-manager Gérard Houllier was not even charged for a similar offence in regard to Middlesbrough's Christian Ziege in 2000. So much for consistency. In the dash to demonise Chelsea it tends to be ignored that Kenyon and Mourinho did not actually pursue Cole.

Yet what the commission palpably failed to do after meting out fines which are all but irrelevant to those concerned, together with that suspended three-point deduction for Chelsea, was recommend that the League should address their own regulations, specifically in the light of the way that transfers are conducted by other key footballing nations.

Logic and fairness dictate that players, be it Cole or a less talented individual, should be no more impeded from being headhunted, or, indeed, seeking a position with rival employers, than the rest of us. Nor should clubs be deterred from seeking out players. But they can't; he can't. Not until five weeks before the end of his agreement, unless it is to a foreign team, in which case players can have initial discussions from 1 January in their last year of contract. The reason, as the Professional Footballers' Association chief executive, Gordon Taylor, puts it, is this: "The rules are in place for the joint benefit of players and clubs to convince supporters that competition is as fair as possible".

That explanation would have had some merit - if only the regulations were observed by all. They aren't, principally because of players' agents (though not all by any means) who continue to operate in clandestine fashion, often with the complicity of the media, to obtain a beneficial move for their clients. That is too often the reality. Players are content to honour contracts for as long as they benefit by them; once they don't, they complain about being shackled, and look to their agent to find the key.

But would a free-for all, a freedom, if he wanted, for a manager to tap like a demented woodpecker and a player to tout his services, be practical, or would it destabilise the whole game? Providing transfer windows remained in operation, it is unlikely to spell the end of the Premiership as we know it.

Certainly there is no evidence that our Continental brethren, who mostly operate under more liberal regulations, would have become embroiled in such a stand-off - one which has resulted in Cole being unlikely to play for his club again, and Arsenal being in a cold war with Chelsea.

Would Europe's major footballing nations have responded similarly? In Germany, yes, though only the club, and not the player, would have been fined. In Spain, no. It is open season for approaches, regardless of a player's contract. In France, no. In Italy, no, but approaches are allowed only when players are in the last year of their contract.

And the latter may be a compromise that the Premier League will have to consider seriously, or continue to look as foolish as they have done this week.