Samuel Eto'o has let African football down. By joining the Russian club Anzhi Makhachkala for mercenary reasons, the Cameroonian has sold off his credibility and his pride.

Eto'o is only 30. He is Africa's finest player of the past decade, and the most decorated ever, with at least three more years in which he could have continued to shred Europe's finest defences. A fourth Champions League triumph, with Inter Milan or another major power, should have been on his to-do list.

Instead he has abandoned the big time for the dubious honour of dignifying a dodgy oligarch's phoney club in a war-torn outpost of a repressive empire in which football racism is rife.

Anzhi's players don't even live in Makhachkala, for fear of a local Islamist insurgency: they live and train in Moscow and fly 1600km to the capital of Dagestan for each home game. Ethnic Russian football fans despise teams from the Muslim Caucasus, such as Anzhi: hence Eto'o will be confronted by two overlapping barrages of racism. You could call this a brave move, and he has never been a coward. But this Indomitable Lion is chasing the wrong buck.

Yes, we're talking rather big bucks here. Reports vary wildly between £167000 per week basic (which is a senior player's standard wage at Manchester City) and the probably false figure of £350000 a week, which would hoist Eto'o above Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo and make him the world's best-paid footballer. Whatever the true package is, it's not worth the premature end of Eto'o's serious career.

Anzhi's billionaire owner, Suleyman Kerimov, is a Dagestan homeboy, but he is not lavishing his money purely out of love of this utterly undistinguished club, founded in 1991. As the East European football guru Jonathan Wilson has noted this week, there is an expedient political motive to his adoption of Anzhi in March. (Kerimov didn't buy the club - it was given to him by the Dagestan president in exchange for a promise of investment in a new stadium.)

Russian prime minister-slash-tsar Vladimir Putin keeps the oligarchs on a short leash; if they annoy him, he has no scruples about jailing them for sins they've all committed, as he did Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

In order to keep Putin sweet, the cringing robber barons help to bankroll his decentralisation policy, which is intended to stabilise and pacify the rebellious southern reaches of Russia.

Putin wants to build symbols of normality and prestige in remote provinces, such as successful football clubs and World Cup matches.

It's a latter-day "bread and circuses" approach to imperial rule. Eto'o is profiting indirectly from Putin's propaganda.

You might retort that smelly money is not hard to find in western European football. True enough. But at least the nouveau riche clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea have identity and history and a fan base that predates their wealth.

Eto'o may somehow find fulfilment in Dagestan. He will have some decent teammates: Roberto Carlos, Yuri Zhirkov, Balazs Dzsudzsak and Mbark Boussoufa. Anzhi are fourth on the log, and might just qualify for next season's Champions League.

And of course, there's nothing sinful about making sacrifices for money. Eto'o doesn't owe his fans any explanations.

But he surely owed us more of his brilliance, which will now be dimmed.