Adam Johnson jailed: 'Don't blame football, but sport must learn'

Johnson was sacked by Sunderland after admitting on the first day of his trial that he had kissed the girlAs Adam Johnson begins his six-year sentence after being convicted of sexual activity with a child, having also pleaded guilty to one count of grooming and one count of kissing the girl, there is an understandable desire to make sure football is doing everything it can to stop such a crime happening again.If it is a worthy aspiration, the sport has been here before; in March 1999, another former England winger, Graeme Rix, at the time assistant coach at Chelsea, was sentenced to 12 months in prison for having unlawful sex with a 15-year-old girl.That it could easily occur once more is explained for some by an easy if unsavoury equation: a lifestyle of entitlement and avarice, a moral black hole when elite players should be role models.Except this is about more than just football, and more specific than some ethical malaise among millionaire young men and those who advise them.You may or may not be comfortable with footballers, Johnson among them, who earn three times as much in a week as the average annual wage in the town where they play, or who choose to spend some of that on blinged-up luxury cars, or who have sexual relations with women who are not their partners.To conflate a materialist lifestyle or promiscuity between consenting adults with what Johnson did, however, is to ignore the very clear distinction between what one individual might consider distasteful and what society as a whole has deemed illegal.To blame football for Johnson, one would equally have to blame the public relations industry for the indecent assaults on young girls carried out by Max Clifford, or the teaching profession and television industry for the two indecent assaults on teenage boys committed by former weatherman and biology teacher Fred Talbot.