The worst thing a batsman once feared was a crack on the head from a bouncer. Now he must cope with a call in the night, an offer of money to throw a match, a threat to his career if he refuses, and a final "We know where your children live". The Pakistani wicket keeper, Zulqarnain Haider, has felt obliged to escape his Dubai hotel and seek political asylum in London, showing how far money has polluted his sport. Haider told the press on Wednesday that he is far from being the only player under such pressure. As last summer's spot-fixing scandal showed, all is not well on either side of the wicket.

I recall watching televised all-in wrestling (briefly) in the company of a distinguished sports journalist, and commenting on the absurdity of its theatricals. They were clearly fixed. I was met with roars of laughter: "All sport is fixed, in some sense or another."

Just as money talked when sport was amateur, so money talks now. In the case of the big money games, such as football, cycling, boxing and cricket, a potent mix of gambling, drugs, media profit and chauvinist politics oils the wheels of play and rolls them into murky places.

The BBC last week received a deputation from frantic football officials who had been bidden by David Cameron to "win" the World Cup for Britain in 2018. The corporation is planning to run a Panorama exposé on corruption in football's international governing body, Fifa, on 29 November, just as its 24 members prepare to vote on Britain's bid.

The BBC allegations are believed to be the same as those revealed last month in the Sunday Times. It is alleged that two members of Fifa were prepared to accept bribes and the footage allegedly shows a Fifa official boasting of his ability to buy votes on which should be the next host country. The accusations are hardly new to students of Fifa and its indestructible boss, Sepp Blatter. But the BBC programme is being aired four days before Blatter's colleagues vote on who gets the cup in 2018 and 2022. The British officials are probably right that the prospect of Fifa coming under sustained scrutiny from the British press will harm their cause. Indeed, they plausibly suggest it may kill the bid stone-dead.

Why the BBC agreed to even meet the officials is a mystery. Their demand that the programme be postponed until after the Fifa vote was outrageous, like al-Qaida calling for a bomb threat to be suppressed until the explosive has gone off. Newspapers should never conspire to conceal a scandal to suit the political interests of governments or the dubious financial interests of sports officials. The BBC rightly sent Fifa's lackeys packing.

Britain should have no truck with a body like Fifa, any more than it should with the International Olympic Committee or those who run much of international sport. Five minutes spent with the cuttings, or trawling such websites as playthegame and transparencyinsport, should have stopped Cameron being photographed shaking hands with Blatter at Downing Street. His staff should have read Andrew Jennings' Foul! on Blatter, and thrown in Christopher Shaw's Five Ring Circus, about the IOC, for good measure.

Incident after incident, case after case, has shown these self-governing supranational apparatus riddled with accusations of backhanders, bribes and fixed votes – often quite legal in the countries where they carefully base themselves, such as Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Their officials jet the world, pushing the one narcotic to which all modern governments are addicted – sporting glory.

For decades the IOC turned a blind eye to the communist bloc's use of drugs to boost performance, or China's (and Tony Blair's) exploitation of the Olympics for political ends. It now demands inexcusable outlays of taxpayers' money to stage its two-week festival of minority sports. When the IOC demands an exclusive "Zil lane" for its official cars up London's Mile End Road, the British government meekly obeys. It would not offer this to a head of state.

Likewise Fifa turns a blind eye to longstanding charges of vote rigging. Its laughable ethics committee deplored last month's revelations as "unethical" and "rumours", though it was forced to suspend six of the alleged "vote fixers" named in the paper. Fifa's Blatter has contrived to keep his job for 36 years, by means that would do credit to a Muammar Gaddafi. He professes "surprise" at talk of bribes while banning journalists like Jennings who ask questions about them from his press conferences.

It is hard to know how deep-seated sports corruption is because the dirt is coated in glamour. Practices that in any other industry would cause an outcry are swept under the carpet in sport. We hear of drugged cyclists, thrown boxing fights, suborned soccer goalies, fake rugby blood, dropped cricket catches, but they blow over. It is amazing that Italian football teams, notorious for referee-nobbling, are still allowed to play internationally.

What is no less extraordinary is the inertia of international bodies supposedly set up to regulate sport. Like other supranational institutions such as the European Union and the UN's agencies, they handle large sums of other people's money without oversight or democratic audit, surrounded by reports of corruption on which they appear to take no proper action. Qatar has reportedly offered $43bn if Fifa will only give it the 2022 World Cup – or rather if the vote-fixers can cut a deal with a rival Iberian bid.

The failings of domestic governments are bad enough, but at least they can be voted from office. Budgets can be cut and staff sacked. Nothing like this happens to supranational bodies. Reliant on the acquiescence of member states, they seem to be able to do what they like and get away with it.

Orwell remarked that sport was nothing to do with fair play, but was "bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence". And that was in the days of amateurism. Today the national and international bodies that rule sport are, as the IOC's former boss, Avery Brundage, once boasted, the new church. They preside over a conservative fanaticism, that is sport, with the indulgence of a 15th-century papacy, in unholy alliance with kings, dictators, bankers and media condottieri.

As long as people are besotted by games, and governments are dazzled by their glamour, cricketers will be bribed and football officials corrupted. Nothing will change. The pharmacists will always be one step ahead of the drug testers. The numbered accounts of Zurich and Geneva will always be one step ahead of the auditors. If this is a medieval church, it need fear no Luther.

Except perhaps one. International sporting bodies do have a critic they fear, a true enemy, the profession of investigative journalism. Sometimes we should thank heaven for it. No one else is doing its job. Roll on, Sunday Times, roll on, Panorama. If England do "lose" the World Cup, it will be in a noble cause.