This week saw the fall of Ohio State’s faux-puritanical Jim Tressel, and accusations of bloody murder, figuratively, within the halls of FIFA. We can decry athletes as thugs and overgrown, spoiled children prone to seeking attention and wearing out sports’ moral fiber. After all, they are the public face of pro leagues, the icons; they entrance and influence fans, and their behavior—whether it’s an ill-timed Miami Heat chest bump or OSU’s Terelle Pryor trading memorabilia for cash and tattoos—is the grist for our national sports conversation. They are the stars, the figures we notice. Unfortunately, they are also largely powerless.

The Heat threatened real structural change, a power grab that made owners uneasy (even as, somehow, much of last summer’s events were seen as a Pat Riley conspiracy). Note the past tense; it’s safe to say that, at least for the time being, there has been no great redistribution of clout in the NBA. The Knicks never had this look of self-determination, and while no one will admit it, preventing another Miami is a part of the owners’ agenda. Pryor has garnered embarrassing headlines, but there’s a reason why Tressel was forced out. Athletes are employees. Real power exists behind the scenes, and there, it’s almost laughable to try ferretting out corruption.

Sports, even the “amateur” ones, are a high-stakes business with infinite human variables. Think players are tempted? Imagine the possibilities for owners, über-coaches like Tressel, and the power-brokers at FIFA. They actually stand to benefit, long-term, from consolidating their power and jockeying for position. It’s the equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs for the jocks themselves, not their run-ins with the law or uncouth remarks. Athletes who falter are, depending on their haircut or the national mood, either morons or symptoms of societal decline. Fingers are wagged, jokes are made, and in the end, these incidents either pass or sidetrack careers. At the level of Tressel and FIFA, ethical breaches aren’t human failings—they are a means to an end. In a sense, as with the Steroids Era in baseball, the real power-brokers in sports aren’t doing their job if they stick to the straight and narrow.

There is no dark side, only varying degrees of risk.

To say otherwise is to pretend that “dirty” isn’t relative, or that—again, returning to PEDs—going too far isn’t the greatest sin imaginable. To say otherwise ignores how much money, and what kind of egos, exist at the tip-top of college football or international soccer. Business is dirty. Why would the backrooms of sports be any different? Anecdotally, we acknowledge this. Yet the unspoken double-standard, and feigned shock at high-level scandal, sticks with us out of some combination of hope and fear.

In part, it has to do with the ways that sports at its best (athletes fulfilling our expectations) by no means escape this undertow. For instance, take this passage from a 1969 Sports Illustrated piece on the adidas/Puma feud. Brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler were at each others’ throats for decades; here, their rivalry boils over as the two compete to see who could buy off the most 1968 Olympians to wear their shoes. One of the tipping points? Suspicions raised by Tommie Smith and John Carlos:

After the notorious Black Power demonstration by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who each carried a Puma shoe to the victory stand, word got around that an investigation was brewing at last. Smith denied there was any significance in the shoe. He said that he and Carlos just wanted to go up there in their black socks and didn’t want to leave the shoes lying around for somebody to steal. Nonetheless, the demonstration was eagerly interpreted as a shill for Puma.

The dissonance between what Smith/Carlos means culturally, and a petty dispute between two German sneaker moguls with very questionable personal and professional histories, is almost comical. That kind of irony is both heartbreaking and if we’re real about it, probably inevitable. Small victories, or all faith in the visible world. This New York Times column on Sherman White, a 1950s New York City phenom who got involved in point-shaving and paid the price, reminds how easy it for athletes to take a disproportionate amount of heat when far-reaching scandals do come to light. White was guilty, no question; Pryor will likely find trouble soon.

Problem is, these lives are both more fragile, and more easily wrecked, than those of the men at the top. Case in point: this entertaining, and mildly chilling, Vagabond run-down on Bulgarian soccer. Like half of these owners are known mobsters. It’s like The Two Escobars but with even worse suits.