With Wembley's Holland match off, what damage does violence do to the Games, and what message is sent to the young?

So there has been one unexpected addition to the programme of test events for the 2012 Olympics now taking place across London. Last weekend, by the Serpentine, it was the triathlon. This week, in Wembley Arena, the badminton. On Tuesday it was beach volleyball at Horse Guards Parade. Next weekend, from historic Westminster to the leafy Surrey Hills and back, it will be the road cycling.

And, right now, perhaps in a high street near you, the riots.

Already the international football, on Wednesday, between England and Holland at Wembley, the venue of the Olympic soccer final, has been postponed, alongside two Carling Cup ties in London, while the weekend's start of the new Premier League season remains in the balance.

As early casualties of the unrest go, this is of little significance when compared with the incineration of a 100-year-old family business or the gutting of dozens of homes. The Wembley match was a friendly fixture and, though 70,000 tickets had been sold, many saw it as an unnecessary intrusion into the start of the domestic soccer season.

But what would happen were similar disturbances to break out again in London's poorer suburbs in 50 weeks' time, on the eve of the Olympic Games?

The showpiece arenas of the Lee valley Olympic Park, which is the main stadium, as well as the velodrome and the aquatics centre, are only a short BMX ride from Hackney's Mare Street, and not much further from Tottenham High Road, in the neighbouring borough of Haringey.

The Games will take place during the school holidays, and the weather could well be warm: two features of this week's riotous events.

Those in charge of security will no doubt be revising and strengthening plans already conditioned by demands which have been steadily rising since the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and one West German police officer by members of Palestine's Black September group in Munich in 1972, followed by the nail bomb at the 1996 Games, which killed a bystander in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park.

In a statement, the International Olympic Committee said: "Security at the Games is a top priority for the IOC. It is, however, directly handled by the local authorities, as they know best what is appropriate and proportionate. We are confident they will do a good job in this domain."

It is tempting to wonder how all this looks to Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, who ran a rival bid for the 2012 Olympics. His city had been the strong favourite; it had most of the necessary facilities already in place. It had not held the Games since 1924. London's success represented such a bitter defeat that Delanoë protested to the Olympic authorities over supposed irregularities in the winning bid. Perhaps he and his colleagues are smiling now.

Or perhaps not, since only six years ago France experienced something very similar to Britain's current disruption. From a small incident involving a handful of youths in Clichy-sous-Bois, one of the eastern suburbs of Paris, rioting spread through the capital's quartiers difficiles and thence to Amiens, Lille, Strasbourg, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille, and elsewhere.

The trouble, in 2005, began on 27 October and lasted until 16 November, Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency, and the policies of his interior minister, one Nicolas Sarkozy, were attacked by Lilian Thuram, one of the black members of France's World Cup-winning team in 1998, who blamed discrimination and unemployment for the country's unrest.

Who will be London's Thuram? Perhaps Rio Ferdinand, the England and Manchester United defender, who would have played in the match on Wednesday. Ferdinand, an articulate 32-year-old, grew up on an estate in Peckham, one of south London's gang-culture spots, and has campaigned against knife crime. "I can't tell the youths exactly what to do but stealing TVs + trainers + burning innocent people's houses + shops ain't solving nothing at all," he said in a tweet.

Not everyone gets the message. "They r rioting because all the London clubs are gonna go trophyless again. Glory glory Man United," one of his 1,350,547 followers replied.

Ferdinand's response to the postponement of the Wembley fixture was straightforward. "Who wants to see a game of football when our country is in turmoil?"

The Football Association issued a statement for the team: "The squad would like to appeal for calm and an end to the disorder that has been going on."

Even Joey Barton, the Newcastle United player who has served a prison sentence for assault, joined in: "Violence always comes from a place of misunderstanding and low to zero self-worth, well mine did anyway," he said via his Twitter account.

Perhaps sport should indeed have some part to play, however minor. London won the 2012 bid on the back of its young people, their significance symbolised by a funky "street art" logo. Promises were hurled around by Tessa Jowell, Sebastian Coe and Ken Livingstone, all pointing to the Olympics as a focus of hope and fulfilment for the young. "This is about kids," Livingstone said.

"Choose London today," Coe said, "and you send out a clear message to the youth of the world. It is a decision about which city will help show a new generation why Olympic sport matters."

In the six years since the bid was won the area has seen much in the way of architectural activity but little in the way of tangible dividends for the younger generation in the London boroughs of Newham, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Haringey.

Meanwhile, youth centres are closing. Eight of 13 have gone in Haringey alone. And school sports programmes in the UK are severely curtailed. Some of the young footballers who would have been playing at Wembley on Wednesday are on salaries of more than £200,000 a week. The nearest most of this week's rioters will get to that is a pair of looted trainers.

• This article was amended on 12 August 2011. The original said that the badminton this week was in the Olympic Park. This has been corrected.