With arriviste scandals like IAAF corruption and tennis fixing threatening to steal its thunder, Fifa is forced into amusing acts of attention-seeking. It’s a bit like when Madonna feels she has to cop off with Justin Bieber or someone at the MTV awards. Excruciating, yet somehow mesmeric.

This week’s limelight-stealing news is that despite being banned from world football for eight years, Sepp Blatter is still being paid to run it. According to a statement from Fifa’s auto-parodic audit and compliance committee, the Swiss is still taking his president’s salary – popularly estimated at in excess of $6m – and will carry on doing so until a new president is elected. Well, you have to hand it to him. (If you don’t, he’ll take it off you anyway.) Perhaps needless to say, Michel Platini is also being paid by Uefa, despite also having been banned from football for eight years.

The one thing that has been stopped is Blatter’s bonus, says the Fifa audit committee, which never tires of pointing out that it is all about transparency. When asked how much of Blatter’s remuneration is bonus-based, it didn’t want to say. When asked last week why the former Fifa general secretary Jérôme Valcke had been summarily sacked, it didn’t want to say. I imagine if you asked what the point of Fifa was, it would decline to comment at this time.

So on it sails, just another of the terminally compromised sporting bodies infecting those others on whom the jury is still out. Even at this stage of the revelations about tennis, I dare you to say Tennis Integrity Unit without reflexively deploying sarcastic air quotes. Sarcastic air quotes are tearing through sport like a contagion. I think it’s fair to say we’re going to struggle to resuscitate “the IAAF ethics commission”. And only the very optimistic can be holding out a lot of hope for the soon-to-be established “IAAF integrity unit”.

However that one shapes up, it will have to go some way to beat my current favourite integrity unit. This honour is strongly held by the International Centre for Sport Security, a body set up to push for greater transparency in the bidding processes for major sporting events, and to safeguard the integrity of sport. If you like the sound of it, you’re going to love the fact that it is literally funded by – you guessed it – the government of Qatar. I know!

Actually, the head honcho of the ICSS gets massively upset if people mention the connection. “The Qatar government has nothing to do with it at all,” fumes this Mohammed Hanzab. “It is true that it is 70% funded by the Qatar government” – do go on – “and 30% is funded through projects we run ... I have said to many people: ‘If you can secure me the 70% from other governments, from other foundations, then I will be happy, as I will be a free man and I will not face this question wherever I go.’”

I really feel for him. It’s like the ICSS is so close to credibility it can almost smell it. As for other governments that may pony up, has he given Moscow a call? Without wishing to go out on a limb here, instinct suggests there could be money for this sort of thing that-a-way.

Despite what could be regarded as a nagging credibility problem, the ICSS looks very busy – though not with what we may tactfully classify as matters “close to home”. Primarily what members of bodies like this appear busy with is trashing the various other units and bodies. This week saw one ICSS executive emerge to sniff about the IAAF’s procedures. “It’s really giving keys to the inmates,” she ruled. To reiterate: she works for a body apparently set up to secure “a self-cleaning culture” in sporting integrity that is funded by the Qatar government, which last year hosted more than 40 international sporting events, and has been under sustained suspicion for its 2022 World Cup bid, to say nothing of the human rights complaints against the country and the staggering death toll amongst migrant workers building the infrastructure for its events.

In such a looking glass world, it is perhaps no wonder the International Olympic Committee is these days held up as the apogee of impeccable sports governance, despite a welter of obvious and systemic flaws, such as its increasing tendency to award hosting rights to authoritarian regimes that blatantly manipulate the IOC for political purposes. Athletes who use the Games to make political points are given draconian punishments; presidents who use them as the curtain raiser to annexe the Crimea are positively encouraged. The IOC was among the swiftest out of the traps to throw itself into sympathetic relief against the Fifa scandal – more in sorrow than in anger, naturally.

I wonder what the population of international sports bodies is, flying governance class from job to job, even as the idea of integrity in sport appears to recede hourly? Stuffed with retired policemen, former Fifa ethics committee members, erstwhile IOC members, graduates of the second-tier Wada departments, they are a globalised micronation of people to whom normal rules never really seem to apply, who never regard themselves as responsible when anything goes wrong and whose rush to comment waspishly on whichever of their counterparts are in the spotlight this week is comically shameless. It may seem a noble journey to those on it but to anyone ordinary it is gravy train – though I’m sure its passengers would find gravy frightfully infra dig. Call it a jus train, then, but hold off wishing it bon voyage.