Cristiano Ronaldo wants to leave Manchester United. Emmanuel Adebayor wants to leave Arsenal – unless he gets a £50,000 pay rise. Gareth Barry wants to leave Aston Villa – and he’s prepared to publicly slate his manager to get what he wants.

Sickening greed from a group of players who don’t know their born? Probably. How much money do you actually need? The more they get, the more they want. No matter how perfect, how pampered their lifestyles, the grass is always greener somewhere else.

What is there left for Ronaldo to achieve? He’s won everything at club level. Signing for Real Madrid won’t make Portugal any closer to being contenders on the world stage. Adebayor sees the wages that players get at other clubs and thinks “I want a bit of that”. He doesn’t look around and see that he is playing for a manager who builds a team that fits him like a glove.

Barry wants Champions League football. Not so long ago a club captain - a player due a testimonial - at a club like Aston Villa would have rolled up his sleeves and tried to get the Champions League to Villa Park. No longer.

So the greed is sickening. As a fan you make an emotional and financial commitment to a club. No longer can you expect the same long-term commitment from players. No longer can you look at a player and think “he could be one of us”. These players are a different breed, an untouchable set of millionaires who never stop wanting more. They have more in common with their billionaire chairmen than the ordinary punter.

You can blame the agents, still a parasitic breed feeding off the game. From the lowliest league player to the biggest international, you’ll find an agent whispering sweet nothings about figures, merchandise and tax-free incentives. For the agent, the player’s success is not about sporting achievement, it’s about more money, about a face becoming more advert-friendly.

You can blame the players themselves for not realising enough is enough, for not giving any real emotion back to the fans who idolise them, who’ll sell each kiss of the badge, each standing ovation to the highest bidder. These players don't realise that it is unnatural for a 23-year-old to have that much money for doing something they enjoy, they don't realise that it is possible to be content with your lot in life.

But the clubs will pay the money. They will bow to their players’ demands. Transfers will be sanctioned. Because the club themselves have dictated this climate of greed, have encouraged players to expect ever more exorbitant sums. For all the clubs complain about agents, about the greed of players, they encourage it with each new TV deal, each new tour of China, each new takeover by a foreign trillionaire.

If I put on a scarf and went along to the London Stock Exchange and cheered each time the share price of BT or Microsoft rose, people would think I was crazy. They’d be right. But that is, essentially, what we are buying into at football grounds up and down the country. If there is a barrier between players and fans now it is nothing compared to the barrier between fans and clubs.

No longer are we the fabled “twelfth man”. They no longer care about our passion, our traditions, our joy at wins, our pain at defeat, our loyalty. They want consumers, customers with a few quid in their pocket. We can’t expect them to share our disdain of the “prawn sandwich brigade” because that demographic is far more appealing to them than the father who scrapes together every last penny just to get his kids to the game.

Ronaldo’s value is about more than football. He is a global brand that can attract people who only vaguely know about Real Madrid. And that means he can ask for, and expect, whatever the hell he wants.

We can be sickened that he wants to leave. We can ask ourselves why he doesn’t have the professional pride to help United win a third straight title and back-to-back Champions League victories. But we can’t be surprised by his actions. This new breed of footballer is distasteful, but he is a direct product of game that has got out of control, that is now a sickening global product itself.

But the most curious fact is that we’ll always go back. For all the greed, for all the money, it remains in our blood.