Every holiday it’s the same: against my better judgment, I rekindle my obsession with Premier League football and its surrounding culture. Scorelines, league tables and transfer windows come and go but modern football achieves a certain permanence from its accompanying gossip, a discourse rich with insights into how people’s beliefs function in today’s society.

This summer, following the national team’s ponderous display at the World Cup, it was Wayne Rooney who became the subject of the latest media witch-hunt, despite having taken pains to alter his image in recent years. However, when news of the Manchester United striker’s infidelity broke in early September (he had squandered £1000 to sleep with a prostitute during his wife’s pregnancy), the coverage revealed more about the public’s tendency to be whipped into a frenzy of prurience than it did about the ramifications and specificity of Rooney’s behaviour.

There is a growing history of the use and abuse of prostitutes by footballers and, as usual, the Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting tale to tell about it. In 1958, the BBC television presenter and sports commentator Stuart Hall claimed to have coined the phrase ‘The Beautiful Game’ as an affectionate, enthusiastic description of football. Soon after, in that same year, the writer Frank Norman published his memoir Bang to Rights: an account of prison life where he described ‘His old woman who was a brass on the game’, playing more euphemistically with ‘game’ as a new slang term for prostitution.

But now that these definitions are beginning to mingle, the media’s reaction has lead only to an impoverished understanding of the questions their intersection poses. To already simple moral issues, further tabloid reductions have been made, provoking the usual name-calling and indignation, giving this urgent affair a distinctly cranky look. When The Sun first reported on Rooney’s particular case they went with the headline “I don’t need you any more” augmented by an elegiac portrait of a “Betrayed Coleen [who] looked stony faced as she finally emerged from her parents’ home”, confining themselves and their readers to threadbare notions of our famous Family Values. Worse still, Roy Greenslade would summarise the debate in his Guardian media blog by confirming, “Mostly though, it is vulgar entertainment for the masses.” Yet, these two different opinions are missing the same basic point: Rooney’s conduct deserves attention less for the marital betrayal it obviously constitutes than the employment of a sex-worker it entails.

To be candid, given the same opportunities and temptations available to the professional sportsman, there isn’t stable evidence that many men wouldn’t act with similar indifference to the taboo. Indeed, in the decade spanning 1995-2005, a recent legal study projected that the number of men paying for sex had doubled. By fixing on the conventionalised celebrity narrative of a marriage under threat, the media are normalising this knotty and ambiguous phenomenon, which needs to be more tenderly explored as a social rather than personal problem.

Perhaps the strangest interpretation of this dilemma came in February from the wife of Portsmouth manager Avram Grant who, faced with complaints that her husband had visited a Thai brothel, defended his actions on the grounds that “He needs a massage not from one woman but two. Morning and night. He’s a great manager with amazing potential who is stuck in a shitty team”. In this hilarious analysis, a negative correlation is sketched between the quality of one’s team and the acceptability of their sexual promiscuity.  Nevertheless, the question of how this promiscuity connects with actual sporting performance is an intriguing one.

During the aftermath of the Rooney scandal, Nike, one of the player’s central sponsors, commented simply, “This is a private matter for Wayne and his family.” But where can the modern footballer seek privacy, when the news has been so full of ‘private acts’ that carry dismaying public resonances about our attitudes towards sex? Our familiar divide between public and private no longer works in assessing controversy, as John Terry proved in March when, in a cup match that immediately followed reports of his secret affair, he celebrated a headed goal as if it were a reprieve from sin. So even the pitch itself, where Hall’s vision of a beautiful game finds its embodiment, has become a place where personal and sporting scores are being simultaneously settled.