Desmond Tutu - former Nobel Prize winner

Now, I like my football, but I also like my peace, and I'm not sure I've ever put the two words in the same sentence before.

Mr Gustaffson seems to think they go together like "hand" and "shake" - words which describe the game's only formal moments of cordiality, one before kick-off, the other after the final whistle.

But in the intervening 90 minutes, we have become generally anaesthetised to a level of aggression and violence on the pitch which regularly turns footballers into eye-bulging warriors and referees into haunted men.

Meanwhile, the fans who once fought pitched battles inside the stadiums now do so in the streets outside where they can get away with it more easily.

And the game's administrators, marketeers and hangers-on form and then dissolve alliances in their search for power and money.

Echoes more of the Great War than Armistice Day, don't you think?

Football - a peaceful game?

Don't imagine I am singling out the British game.

In Television Centre we often glimpse pictures of 22-man punch-ups in South America that rarely see the light of day.

And we might now justifiably call crowd violence the worldwide, not the English disease, with regular outbreaks across Holland, Italy, Argentina and Central America.

But Mr Gustaffson insists on the credibility of his nomination.

Hostile nations may meet on the football field when other contact would be out of the question.

Who can ignore the benefits, he says, of North v South Korea in the 1991 World Youth Championship, or USA v Iran in the 1998 World Cup?

Trouble in Sweden

Fair enough. But balance the peace and harmony of those two hippy love-ins with the 1969 Honduras and El Salvador war which started after the two teams kicked each other to pieces.

Fans did much worse during their two games in a World Cup qualifying competition - I read in my research that the "Soccer War" caused 6,000 deaths.

More recently there were 13 people killed at a World Cup qualifier last year between Zimbabwe and South Africa in Harare.

And Mr Gustaffson, a Swede remember, surely hasn't forgotten the 1992 European Championships and the Battle of Malmo?

Football following Dalai Lama on Nobel Prize stage?

I know I haven't.

I was in it, dodging the English yobs and the horses' hooves along with my cameraman and sound recordist.

We were lucky - the ITN crew got beaten up and their camera trashed.

Maybe Mr Gustaffson subscribes to some academic theory linking the massive growth of the game during the second half of the 20th century to the absence during that period of a Third World War.

"Football as a global safety valve" - discuss.

"America fought wars in Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf because soccer has no place in the psyche of Homer Simpson". Discuss that one too.

As it happens, I do believe that sport in general, played robustly but fairly, has a civilising part to play in the modern world.

But if I was Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, or Nelson Mandela, then I'd be handing back my Nobel Peace Prize pretty sharpish if I heard Sepp Blatter was being booked on a flight to Oslo.