Why I won't support my local football club

For the last six months I've been living around three minutes walk from the stadium of Viktoria Zizkov football club. So it's very near. And it's also very affordable: you wouldn't expect to pay more than two or three dollars admission, which is cheaper than going to the cinema, or pretty much any other form of entertainment you could think of. There are plenty of stands selling beer, and you just have to have a klobasa (even though you know you'll regret it later).

But since I've been living in Zizkov I haven't gone to a single game. That's not because Viktorka are in the Czech second division (after all - who goes to Czech league games for the quality of the football?).

No, the reason I haven't been - and won't go - is that the club has been caught up in a most unsavoury match-fixing scandal. They were docked 12 points by the Czech football association, and former club boss Ivan Hornik has been fined 100,000 crowns and banned for two years.

Hornik is, as a friend of mine might put it, "some boy" - famous for his loud clothes, permanent tan and what looks suspiciously like a perm. But the man's use of the Czech language is amazing.

Newspaper transcriptions of his telephone conversations with referees and other officials (obtained from the police) have made for riveting reading, featuring as they do the roughest, most vulgar Czech you can imagine. It's the kind of Czech you never see on paper. Honestly, I would recommend that any student of the Czech language search them out.

And the transcriptions didn't just amuse me - comedians Jiri Labus and Petr Ctvrnicek actually based a stage play on them. They improvised a little, but most of the show featured the original conversations word for word; they were so outrageous in the first place there was simply no need to spice them up.

Heaven knows what Ivan Hornik is doing now - lying on a sun bed with his curlers in, maybe. But the rest of the Czech football world has been enjoying the start of the new season.

The sports pages have been full of the good news that attendances have been high. I say high, but that's high by Czech standards: the opening weekend's average gate was 6,243, which may not seem like much but then the average gate last season was pitiful - less than 4,000 a game.

There seems to have been a widespread concern that fans would stay away from the Czech league, after last season's string of scandals. But maybe that was undue pessimism; maybe fans are so used to corruption, and the Horniks and other dubious characters that run the Czech game, that the revelations haven't put them off. The few committed supporters there are just support their team, come what may.

But I myself don't have an emotional attachment to any Czech team. And believing, as I do, that the country's football has a long way to go before it's rid of the stench of corruption, I think I will be staying away for a very long time.