For obvious reasons I haven’t taken much notice of this

[redgunamo]

Oh, that's all irrelevant nowadays, I'm afraid. The game has so many alternative revenue streams that no-one cares about the atmosphere at the ground. Even if they just fill the place up with global sportswear, hotel chain and airline marketing company junketeers on a sort of busman's holiday, that'll do.

Maybe the developments passed us by but the fact is that hardly anybody actually watches football matches on television anymore, yet interest in and information about, even involvement in said games has apparently never been higher.

You can sit down in front of your Panasonic TV in your Nike socks and follow it on Twitter at the same time and bet on the outcome on your iphone while checking for decent car insurance deals on your Sony laptop and sipping a Heineken or a Pepsi, paying for your pizza delivery with your Mastercard, watching a movie on Netflix. The fact is, you are contributing to Mesut Özil's wages whether you can actually be bothered to watch him aimlessly, pointlessly stroll about the pitch or not. Football is merely the honey pot that attracts all the money.

I have no problem with pricing the product at the market rate but this seems to me to be deliberately excluding the supporters of the competing clubs, which will surely prove counter-productive when the TV audience is disappointed by the lack of atmosphere on display, and ceases to cough quite so enthusastically for the product?

And holidn ithe final in a country which cannot guarantee the safety of one of our players because of his nationality is just mind-boggling.