ON ITS ARSE?

‘Here are some other prices: Real Madrid €20, Valencia €18, Roma is €15, Juventus €20 for league games and €30 for the Champions League - less than half of what it cost to watch Chelsea v West Brom reserves last month.

In Germany, long the home of decent football at reasonable prices, a mere €12 will get you into Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund next week, and tickets for Bayern's next Champions League game are €25. Children can watch most German games for €6 (£4.30). Everton, the people's club, will be charging kids £17 next week to watch Wigan. Chelsea want the full £45 for any seat, any age, any game. Plus booking fee.

Premiership clubs are not uniformly avaricious - Blackburn and Aston Villa have adult tickets for £15 and West Brom and Wigan have schemes where children can watch for a fiver - but taken as a whole English football is far too expensive. It is not easy to take English football as a whole - price fluctuations even within the Premiership are enormous - but when it costs more to watch Woking or Accrington Stanley than it does to see Roma or Bayern Munich, there is probably something wrong.’