The timing could not be much better. We wait nearly a decade for a new work from Patrick Marber and just as it arrives the FIFA scandal gives what might have been a modest little play about football an unexpected urgency.

Set in the grubby changing room of a non-league English football club, Marber bypasses the glamour at the top of the game for the grittier life of semi-professional football.

Daniel Mays is Jimmy Kidd, the fast-talking, ambitious manager whose hope that he can promote the club and, more importantly, himself, is given a boost by the arrival of an unknown new talent. The new lad, Jordan (Calvin Demba) is good. At one stage the name Pele is mentioned.

For kit man John Yates (Peter Wight) - a former star of the club whose headed goal during an FA cup tie became club legend - the raw teenager with an insanely cultured pass hit with the outside of the boot, is everything that he used to love about the game: "something so pure, so innocent." And the manager is everything Yates despises about the game today: the corruption, the selfishness. "You don't love the game. You're the plague."

Their fight to win the loyalty of Jordan takes on a far greater symbolism into a battle for the soul of football.

But if Marber's sympathies are with the romantics, it should be remembered that his play about love, Closer - recently revived at the Donmar - revealed the savage humanitarian in the writer. And the best lines and most persuasive arguments belong in this play to the venal Kidd. His dad took him, as a boy, to see Yates play and advised his son to emulate the player's qualities. "I said, 'Dad it's a lovely sentiment, but you're an alcoholic postman.'"

In Anthony Ward's design, the water-stained changing room where the action takes place, you can almost smell the stale sweat and Ralgex. If I have a gripe, it's that sometimes Marber's language feels a tad overwrought. It dares to put a lyricism into the mouths of working-class men who probably never read a poem in their lives. "That day… I was never so loved," says Yates of the moment he scored his goal. But "Nor loved this life so strong…" might be a poetic line too far.

But it's a terrifically witty script, too, especially when Ian Rickson's beautifully performed, if under-paced production allows Mays to take the reins. There is a shifty charm here that brings to mind George Cole's Flash Harry in the St Trinian's comedies.

Yet there is pain, too. As with the other males in the play, life beyond the football ground is a wreck for both Yates - failed marriage - and Jordan -parental abuse.

For them, football is more than a game. And certainly more than the cash cow the sport has become for FIFA's allegedly - and not so allegedly - corrupt officials. For Marber's men it is sanctuary.