Population of Manchester -392,819.

Manchester United’s worldwide fan-base - 75 million.

Something about these figures doesn’t add up. Now, I understand the support of kids in China, America, Ireland and other countries with no football culture to be proud of. But a sizeable number of these United ‘fans’ live in the UK, particularly down here in the South-East. This, I believe is a major part of what’s wrong with football today.

Imagine if all these people supported their local team. Many, many clubs below the Premiership are in huge debt while football’s elite, Arsenal, Liverpool, United and now Chelsea, make millions off the back of shirt sales to kids and adults who have no real idea what it is to support a club.

Consequently, the gap between the rich and poor gets bigger as United fans living in Newhaven moan that they only spent £20 million on players in the summer while their local professional team, Brighton and Hove Albion, run at a huge loss and have no stadium of their own to speak of.

Never mind sitting on their a***s every Sunday watching Sky - the system that forces real supporters of their team to attend kick-offs at the most inconvenient times. They should be down at the Withdean, which can’t fill its 7,000 capacity in a city of around 155,000, plus a sizeable catchment area with no other senior clubs.

Or they should join the campaign for Brighton to get their planned 22,000-seater stadium in Falmer, although it will be half-empty anyway if the plastic cycle continues.

So who is to blame for this sorry state of affairs? The football media, mainly. When the Premiership was formed in 1992 the country’s top clubs effectively divorced from the Football League. Since then, winning the league has been the preserve of the wealthy as opposed to the days when small clubs like Derby, Nottingham Forest or even QPR could at least be in the running in the right circumstances.

Most of Sky’s success has been founded on bankrolling Premiership clubs, broadcasting and over-saturating the market with their product. CaughtOffside itself only has Premiership coverage, and at the time of writing features solely articles on ‘the big four’ on the front page.

The only way to break this vicious cycle is a complete overhaul of football’s media, with coverage for clubs based roughly on how many fans attend their games. Smaller clubs, too, need to work harder to attract local fans, and reinforce the notion that when they play they represent that area.

As for the big four, you can’t expect them to stop marketing themselves at kids living hundreds of miles from the ground. But if they continue to do so, and the rich/poor divide becomes greater, supporters will get bored with football’s predictability. I for one can’t see anyone apart from Manchester United , Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal winning the league in the next 15 years.

Football’s wealth and fan-base needs to be redistributed fast before the bottom falls out of the game and the competitive element is lost completely, and a whole generation becomes armchair fans.

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