While it may have sent the already profoundly damaged FIFA brand spiralling to yet new depths, it seems to have had no effect whatsoever on the appeal of the football body’s flagship product - the FIFA World Cup.

Following the thrills and spills of the unexpectedly exciting 2014 tournament in Brazil, the World Cup brand is, I would say, in as good a place as at any time since the 1970 competition of the Gordon Banks save, the “game of the century” Italy v West Germany semi-final, the Bobby Moore/Pelé embrace and arguably the most elegant Brazil side ever assembled.

It is as if, say, the Apple brand had been trashed to kingdom come without leaving the slightest dent in the affection its customers feel for their iPhones.

It is worth thinking about why this is so.

The first thing to acknowledge is that it would be unrealistic to expect FIFA, no matter how magnificent its bureaucratic interventions, ever to be as loved as one of the great football tournaments.

Even events as dramatic in their own way as last week’s FIFA Congress do not classify as mainstream entertainment. “They think it’s all over,” as the late, great Kenneth Wolstenholme might have said as Prince Ali re-emerged to deliver his short concession address in Zurich. “It is now.”

Like most administrations, the best FIFA can hope for is invisibility.

Nevertheless, for all FIFA’s problems, for all the fierce criticism of its choices of host for both the 2018 and 2022 tournaments, the World Cup, patently, is as treasured today as when Chuck Blazer was an obscure button manufacturer.

How has it managed to avoid sustaining collateral damage from the fearful battering FIFA is enduring?

Principally, I think, it is because people still, on the whole, believe what they are watching.

Unlike sports such as athletics and road cycling, whose respective publics have been corroded by cynicism to the point where almost any unexpectedly impressive performance gives rise to the most pointed of questions, the untold millions who watch the World Cup broadly think they are witnessing two teams of athletes at the peak of their game trying their guts out on sport’s flattest cliché – a level playing-field.

That is not to say football is immune from doping and match-fixing; far from it.

But the great majority of this event’s vast global audience still seem to see no reason to suspect that they are watching anything other than good, honest, occasionally breathtaking, athletic endeavour.

This, presumably, is why FIFA’s remaining sponsors show few signs of walking away from a brand that has become toxic in much of the industrialised world.

While the present hoo-ha cannot be comfortable for them, the rights they have acquired entitle them to put their name up in lights during one of those incredibly rare events that are loved by a significant chunk of the population of every single country in the world. Still.

It is a similar story for broadcasters, which are the cornerstone of FIFA’s business model.

While the World Cup remains so compelling to so many people, it seems unrealistic to expect them to be altruistic enough to give the tournament a wide berth in the hope that this may act as a lever to force institutional reform of a governing body that has failed effectively to combat corruption in the international game.

The only way I could imagine this scandal that is threatening to engulf FIFA spilling over to inflict damage on the brand of its flagship competition is if investigators ever unearthed evidence suggesting that corruption on the part of football officials extended to large-scale fixing of World Cup matches.

That really could begin a process that might end by throttling the life out of the goose that lays FIFA’s - sole - golden egg.

But the sort of bribery allegations with which we have become so wearily familiar are only plausible in an environment in which countries were desperately keen to host one of the world’s pre-eminent sporting gems.

For that reason, I would be surprised if any such evidence emerges from the present investigations.