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All too often, football fans get treated like they are brain dead morons who lack any ability for critical thought. Managers think you’ll be content to listen to the deserved-a-result and ref-done-us-wrong spiel in the post-match interview. Television companies think you’re motivated by terms like Super-Grandslam Sunday, as if you couldn’t figure out on your own that the top-4 playing each other on the same day wouldn’t be worth watching.

I also find the level of analysis and tactical insight to be sorely lacking in television and newspapers. The co-commentator is too often limited to say-what-you-see analysis during the replays: “Well, the winger crossed the ball in…and the striker jumps above everyone else…gets his head to the ball…and it’s in the back of the net”. Yeah, thanks for that.

I want to like the Telegraph’s new Champions League 3D feature that turned up on their website for this week’s Champions League games involving Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea. It’s really nice technology: Graphics like you’ll find in the FIFA-style games that accurately represent the players actions during the goals; the play is marked-up to highlight the runs of players; virtual camera angles that would physically impossible to capture on the pitch.

But the commentary that goes with it reverts to the state-the-bloody-obvious style that we find on TV. The Arsenal highlights start out well by highlighting Adebeyor’s neat run from the goal line to the edge of the six-yard box - I didn’t spot that on ESPN. It’s all downhill from there though - just have a listen and you’ll probably feel that a child could have come up with something more original.

Well done to the Telegraph for trying something new. They’ve done the hard part in putting the 3D replays together - they just need to find an intelligent footballer to narrate it.

Alright, so maybe they haven’t done the hard part.

We’ve seen how the teams that occupy the top spots in the Premier League have become increasingly easy to predict. Once a team spends five years in the top four, they never leave - a trend that has lasted for fifteen years and counting. In this post, I have a chart that shows how the gap between the teams in first and fifth place have increased dramatically over recent years.

[A note on the points totals in this (and similar) posts. Whenever I compare points totals in today’s Premier League to the Division One from 20 or 30 years ago, I adjust the older points total to make it comparable to today. Specifically, I re-calculate using three points for a win, and then reduce the number of points proportionally to allow for the number of games played in a season - 38, 40 or 42].

Between 1973 and 1997, the average number of points separating first and fifth place was 16 points. This shows how compact the league used to be - just five or six wins separating the top five places. A fan can usually look back on a season and five a handful of results that could have been wins instead of defeats, so they could live in hope and think of what might have been.  This applies not just to the team that came second, but for the fans of the top-5.

Looking at the last five years, that gap has been stretched to 29 points. Early on in the season, fans quickly realise that this isn’t going to be their year. The focus becomes who will qualify for the UEFA Cup - which is something, but not as exciting as winning the league. The UEFA Cup has become a goal, rather than a consolation, for many teams.

The question becomes - how much worse will this situation become? The rate of increase surely can’t continue, but with the money being thrown at the teams at the top four, I’m betting it will get worse rather than better.

A theme I’ll look to develop in this blog is the financial mess that football clubs find themselves in. I think it’s pretty fair to say that many clubs don’t have a good business model.

Looking at a club purely from a business perspective, you’ll often find lots of income and customers, but expenses that result in a net loss.

If this blog had 23,849 loyal readers, I can tell you two things

1) I’d be generating some income, but still a pretty modest amount - maybe $100,000 in my wildest dreams.

2) I’d be making a profit, because there’s no way I can spend more that $100K a year on a blog.

By an uncanny coincidence, 23,849 is also the average attendance that Southampton enjoy in the 2006/07 season. What did they do with this impressive fan base?

1) Generated lots of income - £10.5 million in matchday receipts and £23.2 million from all sources.

2) Made a loss of £1 million (which was only so low because the club made £5 million in trading players).

It beggers belief that a business with thousands of loyal customers who pay, on average, £450 a season just at the ground, can end up losing money. But Southampton have managed it, and most clubs are doing something similar.

Fast-forward to the end of the 2007/08 season and things have not improved for the Saints. Today’s news included a dispatch about Southampton being prepared to take a £3 million haircut on Theo Walcott’s transfer fee just to accelerate the pace of installments. This is like taking the ‘lump sum’ option when winning the lottery rather than accepting payments over thirty years - never a sign of solid financial planning.

If there’s one thing that’s fundamentally flawed about organized football, it’s the following:

1) Teams that win competitions are rewarded with lots of money.

2) Teams are allowed to spend unlimited money on improving their playing squad.

3) The teams with the best squads win the competitions.

4) Repeat steps 1-3 until everyone is thoroughly bored.

So a few clubs get their noses out in front and never look back.

The reward structure of the Premier League is actually quite reasonable - the top club gets less than double that the bottom club earns.  The problem comes with the Champions League - the top four effectively double their Premier League earnings with a decent run in Europe, and therefore end up with four times as much as the bottom club (table).

This has the predictable result of making the top three or four clubs untouchable in their domestic competition.

They say that money is the root of all evil. Well, it’s certainly at the root of much that is wrong with the Premier League. How can they hope to run any kind of even competition, when a handful of the clubs are getting a huge leg-up from a competition that the others are not even able to enter?