The Paranoid Brian Glanville on Fan-Free-Football
When you get above a certain level football sees supporters as an inconvenience, there to be patronised, fleeced, sold crap, and whipped up until they burst into tears on Five Live as evidence of their 'passion'. The passion expended on safely securing broadcasting income is the one expenditure that no club minds incurring. Which is why players are currently playing to empty stadiums under testing regimes unavailable to the rest of the population. The broadcasting money musn't be given back. Get 'em out on that pitch., Even when Newcastle stank the place out with their mooted takeover by the journalist-murdering Bin Salman gang, it was only when he was seen to be profiting from bootleg sports broadcasting that anyone in football got worked up about it. Left to bubble away in a cesspool like that Bob Lord's comparatively innocuous vision of football run viably without fans could come true, on the knobbly