Footballers are not entirely like the rest of us. Yesterday, in a Sky interview, the former England forward, Steve Bull, was talking about the former England goalkeeper, Bert Williams, who celebrated his 90th birthday on Sunday. “If I get to half that age,” said Bull, “I’ll be happy.” It turns out that Bull will be 45 on March 28.

I am afraid that I don’t find the John Terry story very much less funny than the Bull tale. Possibly I am making the same mistake as Chekhov, who thought that he had written comedies, where everyone else perceived tragedy, but when you examine the dramatis personae and main actions in the current England captain’s sex drama, it isn’t easy to restrain your laughter.

My favourite by-blow was a red-top kiss-and-tell at the weekend from another young lady who had enjoyed the oft-lavished favours of the Chelsea man. Alicia Douvall, a “glamour model”, recounted a romance with Terry from a few years ago. Actually, romance may not be quite the word, since he hailed her across the Movida club with the words “You’ve got really nice boobs”, which led, within minutes, to kissing and then to the ultimate act of courtship when “he put a cocktail stirrer in my cleavage and made explicit remarks about what he’d like to do to me … Then he said, ‘Do you like girls? I’d love to have a threesome with you.’ I told him I didn’t mind,” said Alicia.

Others who didn’t mind were, according to reports, “17-year-old blonde Jenny Barker, ex-porn star Karina Clarke, 29, and busty Nicola Ulian”. And then there was the immortally yclept Shalimar Wimble.

None of this had caused a problem, or prevented Terry from being named Dad of the Year in 2009 (presumably not byClairvoyancy magazine). But it has been the revelation that it was the girlfriend of a former fellow team member at Chelsea and a current squad-mate for England, Wayne Bridge, that Terry slept with, that has tipped the balance decisively towards condemnation.

And a lot of the other reasons given to sack Terry are persiflage. Actually we have no idea what the effect on team morale of this incident will be, nor is it relevant that the woman concerned subsequently had an abortion that Terry paid for (shouldn’t he have paid?), nor can other moral turpitudes, long known about, now be prayed in aid. Or the old media saw of “he’ll be so distracted by what we’re going to throw at him that he ought to resign”.

Of course Terry’s behaviour tells you something about the man; the problem is that we don’t know what, and we have no idea whether what it tells us is in any way inimical to taking England through a semi-final against Germany. Historically it would seem more relevant to ask about his penalty-taking.

And yet there is something so fundamentally threatening about Terry’s (consensual) bedding of Vanessa Perroncel that it unites the excitable and the level-headed in a determination that he should depart the captaincy. So why? It isn’t as though the ranks of journalism, as those of politics and, I daresay, any other profession, are not swelled by adulterers.

Dare I suggest that Terry’s crime is not in being unfaithful to his wife — a condition we are blasé about these days — but in stealing another man’s woman? That’s what threatens chaps, hence all the talk of team-mates.

In his epic study of myth and anthropology, The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer cited the cases of several tribes whose male hunters believed that a wife’s adultery gave power to their prey to avoid capture. The Wagogo hunters of East Africa took this a stage farther and intuited that if they were unsuccessful in the hunt this was because their wives at home were unfaithful. The sea-otter hunters of the Aleutian islands were of the same mind, and in Sarawak men out searching for camphor understood that their wives’ infidelity caused the camphor to evaporate.

Incidentally this suggests that the one place that England players will want to see Terry is by their sides in South Africa so they can keep their eye on him.

It doesn’t take a Freudian extremist to see in this act of sexual piracy the classic act of castration, of loss of potency. Nor does it demand an evolutionary psychologist to pontificate on the seemingly timeless worry on the part of a man that he may be bringing up someone else’s child. Not so long ago the advertisements that adorned the men’s urinals at the Tottenham Hotspur Football Ground, and in many motorway service stations, began to offer the services of a paternity testing kit that could be administered surreptitiously.

As it says in the Bible, in Proverbs, about the man who sleeps with another’s wife: “For jealousy is the rage of a man: therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance. He will not regard any ransom; neither will he rest content, though thou givest many gifts.” Which is a psychology not far away from the rationale for the burka, seeing the woman essentially as a chattel, and a prop to male power, a power that is magically diminished by an infidelity or even an immodest wisp. For an immodest wisp is but an assignation away from being a consummation.

If it’s not about the seduction of the attached woman, how else might we explain the lack of particular and urgent interest in Terry’s other adulteries with unattached ladies? The social power of footballers is, in large part, famously expressed by their possession of WAGs, of “trophy wives”, women whose main, if not only, attribute is their astounding and immediate good looks. They are chosen precisely so that they can be paraded as a symbol of manly success — and the “better” the WAG, the bigger the guy. So when another man, the England captain, exercises a form of droit de seigneur, it threatens their masculinity, and (if dear reader, you are male) ours.

My eldest daughter sees things differently. No Shalimar Wimble, she has never liked John Terry because of his surly and occasionally brutal efficiency on the pitch, but she believes that he is far from being alone in playing the field. And she adds (as a girl who takes equality for granted) that she is amazed that no one’s talking about the woman. Ms Perroncel, after all, was not ravished and apparently admits that the affair happened in a low point in her own relationship when “John was there for me”. Her choice.

My daughter is also amazed by the whole thing because, in her words, Wayne Bridge is so much better-looking.