YOU DON'T have to be David Attenborough to realise that monkey noises are emitted, inevitably, by knuckle-dragging apes. Even the great naturalist would have a few problems, though, in trying to explain why so many of football's natural-born chimps are to be found in eastern Europe.

It's a fact, nevertheless, and evidence of what is now an established pattern.

FK Zeta do not have a great deal to be proud of on the park. Montenegro and the rest of the Balkans meanwhile lack anything in their recent history of which they can boast. Yet what did we get in Podgorica last Tuesday?

A long-suffering region, with plenty of experience of man's inhumanity, subjecting DaMarcus Beasley and Jean-Claude Darcheville to the kind of racist abuse that will never be mistaken for wit, or reason.

Welcome to what Fifa and Uefa are pleased, always, to term "the football family". It counts as one of those glib, nauseating phrases invented by marketing men who never meet Italian fascists socially, who have never heard Spanish national coaches on the subject of black Frenchmen, or witnessed Rangers fans - their own players racially abused - exporting sectarian abuse to sunny Inverness.

What family, exactly? If it exists at all, it counts as dysfunctional. Sometimes it resembles the Addams Family of sport. The point is that the gulf between comforting, inspirational rhetoric and reality grows ever wider.

Even the tribe's newly discovered rich uncles are a little, shall we say, strange. Has a fit and proper person just taken control of Manchester City? Is anyone even asking? Has third-party ownership of the "economic rights" in the talents of a player - let's call him Tevez - just become acceptable because Manchester United came to the table?

These are rhetorical questions, inevitably. They mark the difference between what you know and what you can prove. Has Italian football ever been corrupt? Don't bother with an answer. Has all of the £400 million in transfer money (and counting) sloshing through the Premiership found its way to legal, accountable and appropriate destinations? Knacker of the Yard will be on the case, again, before too long.

Racism is regarded as a crime in a different moral category. I don't dispute that, necessarily. I applaud Uefa and Michel Platini when they say that tolerance no longer exists, that Red Star Belgrade will face consequences if Serbian hospitality is not extended to Rangers, Beasley, Darcheville or anyone else who fails to meet the local chimps' standards of purity.

In a sense, though, racism is an easy challenge. You can't mistake the monkey noises. They remind you of the old Woody Allen sketch in which his cocktail-party hostess compliments the comic on the effectiveness of elegant satire in confronting fascists. No, no, says Woody. Baseball bats are effective. Baseball bats, he adds, are really effective.

Uefa's bat tends to be of the foam rubber variety. Clubs get fined an apprentice's wage. Apologies - Zeta will do a nice one, no doubt - are submitted. If actual rioting takes place, an outfit such as Partizan Belgrade will possibly, in extremis, find itself expelled from the Uefa Cup. But no one ever hoses out the stables. There is too much money at stake, and there is "the family" to think about.

The language jars. It depends on the proposition that warm words create warm feelings. It makes football sound like one of those old Coca Cola ads in which the whole wide world was taught to sing awful, sentimental rubbish. It forgets, as most of us choose to forget, that a lot of the game depends on sheer, undiluted hatred. Local, international, high or low: that's just a fact.

Don't take my word for it. Here's our old friend Jack Warner, a Fifa vice-president, no less, and president of Concacaf. The man from Trinidad and Tobago has encountered a few questions during his career. He helped to force the removal of John McBeth from the association because the Scot suggested that Caribbean and African football countries were "tainted with greed". But Warner, Sepp Blatter's dear friend, is free to speak his own mind.

Last week he said that England must on no account land the 2018 World Cup. "England at no time has had the love and support of Europe," said the man defending Concacaf's claim. "For Europe, England is an irritant."

We Scots on occasion have difficulty arguing with such sentiments. McBeth, for one, was incautious enough to find himself on record suggesting England, guts and all, are hated internationally. But Warner, remember, helped to engineer the humiliation of Britain's nominated Fifa vice-president just by suggesting racism.

Not monkey noises: merely the suggestion that African and Caribbean countries had been corrupted in the eternal search for votes among the international governing body. Obviously no one would then suggest that Warner's remarks towards England - on the BBC World Service - resembled any sort of slur.

That, though, is the football family. Rangers will meet unwelcome cousins in Belgrade, Celtic in Moscow. In Glasgow itself the Difficult Twins have another SPL season in which to test the limits of - what's the phrase? - friendly banter. The myth that football brings us all together, beneath the all-seeing eyes of Blatter, Platini and the sponsors, is threadbare.

Some play their football with the indulgence of ruthless dictators, some beneath the gaze of ruthless tycoons.

Some are observed by advocates of racial or religious purity, some by those who see football as a poor substitute for totalitarianism.

Beyond the cocoon of the Premiership, poverty-stricken African, South American and Asian youths are on football's conveyor belt, like prime beef, their "economic rights" available for a few dollars more. Within the European elite, vast sums corrode all visible means of moral support while the likes of Blatter and Warner, our guardians, pontificate, and grow rich.

The old cliché says that you can choose your friends, but you cannot choose your family. Yet across the football world I continue to encounter people who are no kin of mine. Mercifully, a lot of them are in the Balkans.