IN leafy west London a nine-year-old boy sits down to make a list of the players in his form's football team. He divides the paper into vertical columns. In the first one he writes the players' names, 11 of them plus a substitute. Next he writes their positions - defender, midfield, striker. And in the final column he adds the name of the club each boy supports.
There's one vote for Spurs. One for Wimbledon one for Norwich City. One for Blackburn Rovers. Two for Liverpool. And six - six - for Manchester United.
As the boy writes the list, his own Manchester United shirt hangs behind his bedroom door. The name "GIGGS" and the number "11" are on the back But this boy has never seen United in the flesh. Nor have the five classmates who share his allegiance. Probably none of them has even visited Manchester, 200 miles from their homes. Yet each has fallen under the spell of a phenomenon that is in full view as the season approaches its climax.
In fact English football seems to have been in a state of permanent climax since the start of the decade, and at its pinnacle stands the immense popularity of Manchester United and its players. Eric Cantona is probably the most famous sports personality in Britain, while Ryan Giggs's playground appeal matches that of any pop star.
Each of them earns wages off around £15,000 a week - about £750,000 a year - plus huge amounts from privately-negotiated endorsements.
Cantona, who turns 30 next month, can expect to earn similar sums until the end of his career. But for Giggs, who is just 22, life holds out a very different prospect. When his current contract expires at the end of the century, he will be in his prime. And by that time the face of football will have been transformed again. If you want to secure Giggs's signature on his next deal, you might need to think in terms nearer £100,000 a week or £5 million a year.
And why not? Giggs and Cantona are the chief weapons in the marketing strategy of a club that turned itself into a publicly-quoted company in 1991 and now has a stock market valuation of about £150 million, with a pretax profit last year of £20 million, its prosperity based not just on turnstile revenue but on sponsorship (£7.6 million), television rights (£6.8 million) and sales of replica kit (£23.5 million).
Now these two players and their team mates are preparing for tomorrow's last Premier League match of the season, hoping to win the title for the third time in four years. This day week they face Liverpool in the FA Cup final, the season's traditional closer. But throughout June there will be an even more lavish event: Euro 96, the quadrennial European championships, contested between 16 teams spread around eight English cities, with a final at Wembley on June 30th.
No clairvoyant would have dared predict all this at the beginning of the decade, when English football was apparently in terminal decline, clouded by the disasters at Heysel, Bradford and Hillsborough, and just beginning what looked a hopeless process of rehabilitation.
Yet now football is everywhere. On the back page, on the front page, filling the special sports sections in the Monday papers, and never off the television screens - Match of the Day, The Sunday Match, Monday Night Football, Football Italia, They Think It's All Over, Fantasy Football League. Urban lamp standards fly the streamers of the Euro 96 sponsors: McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Fuji, Mastercard. Shopping centres teem with men wearing replicas of England's new grey away shirt, advertised with the line: "Looks good with jeans".
Oasis, leaders of the Britpop movement, flaunt their allegiance to Manchester City. Newsagents' racks bulge with the new breed of glossy, literate football magazines: Four Four Two, Total Football, Goal. The mania extends to a new taste for the exotic: the names of Colombian and Croatian players are as familiar as the cast of Coronation Street. Football is the biggest thing around; and it is also, for the moment, cool.
A working-class game has become a textbook example of rampant free-market capitalism and is currently enjoying a boom which, like all booms, appears irreversible. It also displays many genuinely positive aspects. Attendances at matches have been rising for several seasons, and a large proportion of the new supporters are women and children. In this sense, the game has begun to purge itself of some unhelpful traditions.
But in the last few weeks, cracks have appeared. On FA Cup semifinal day, the TV cameras showed whole blocks of vacant £38 seats at Old Trafford; the fans of two of England's best supported lb, Liverpool and Aston Villa, had been priced out. A couple of weekends ago, losing a vital game, Manchester United changed their strip at half-time, claiming that the players couldn't see each other, thus breaking faith with those who had spent £60 or so on the outfit. And last week, at the Wembley Conference Centre, where 3,000 "delegates" were expected to pay £750 each to listen to discussions on the commercial future of football at an event titled Soccerex `96, there were never more than 300 in the hall to hear the thoughts of super agent Mark McCormack, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, and many others.
Has it all gone too far, too fast? After all, even Britain's number one fan isn't wearing his passion quite so lightly any more.
"I used to watch absolutely everything, even the school boy internationals on ITV," Nick Hornby says. "Now I Just don't bother, half the time."
Hornby is widely credited with creating the phenomenon of the middle-class obsession with football in England, a process of upward democratisation. His book Fever Pitch has sold 300,000 copies since its publication less than four years ago, taking sports literature into a new dimension, both aesthetically and commercially. The confession of a middle-class Arsenal fan, it legitimised what had been, for many such men, a secret vice.
But now, just when the literary novelist D.J. Taylor is setting his latest offering in the milieu of a struggling football club, when Queens Park Rangers fan Michael Nyman is preparing to premiere an opera titled a. e. t. (football shorthand for "after extra time") at the Salisbury Festival on the eve of Euro 96, when the new number two at Channel 4 is establishing his credentials with loud references to his support of St Johnstone, and when the Turner Prize-shortlisted painter Mark Wallinger is among the contributors to an exhibition called Off-side: Contemporary Artists and Football at Manchester City Art Galleries, Nick Hornby appears to be going off the whole thing.
"I think I've watched about two live matches on TV this season, he says, explaining that his disaffection is based on television's saturation approach. "It's all grotesquely over-exploited." Has the game just become too popular? "Football has always been this popular, but it always left us wanting more. Now it's like music. It's on all the time, and you can tune in or not. And most of it isn't any good."
Fever Pitch came out in the very month that the top echelon of English football reshaped itself into the Premier League, launched with the boost of a £250 million five-year contract from Rupert Murdoch's Sky operation. "It was the big money from satellite television that really heralded the current boom," Graham Kelly, chief executive of Britain's Football Association, says. "It meant that English clubs were able to match their foreign competitors."
Other factors had come into play more or less coincidentally. Italia 90, the 1990 World Cup, brought a new idea of sophistication to football. "That was a big boost," Kelly continues. "It captured the imagination. Then the Taylor Report and the all-seater stadiums meant that it was that much more comfortable to go to the top games."
In its new civilised form, football became the ideal bait with which Sky could persuade the public to buy its dishes. Now, however, even some insiders agree with Hornby on the dangers of too much exposure. "You can't switch on a TV without seeing a football match," Jack Charlton, former Ireland manager and a member of England's 1966 World Cup-winning team, said at Soccerex `96. "It surprises me that we're not sick of it already."
Tentatively, the chief executive of the Football Association agrees. "Probably most people in football believe we've reached saturation point," Graham Kelly observes. People say to me that it's destroying the game at the lower levels, because everyone wants to watch Liverpool and Manchester United instead of supporting their local club. But I can't see any way of turning the clock back, of stopping the wave of football coming in."
He's right there. Next season Sky plans to televise 170 games, but before the end of the decade the number will be many times that, thanks to the arrival of digital television, with its ability to deliver 2,000-plus channels simultaneously on a pay-per-view basis. And the future is almost here: in France next season viewers will, be able to select any first division match, delivered live at home.
Greg Dyke, head of Britain's new Channel 5 network, told the Soccerex `96 TV seminar: "Football will have to learn to look at television in a completely different way. Once you can deliver a couple of thousand channels, TV will become an extension of the turnstile. So you'll have 30,000 in the ground and thousands more paying at home."
Other terrestrial broadcasters resist this, clinging hopefully to the notion of the televised big match as a collective experience. "There has to be some area of public record, a way for the majority of the public to watch together," Brian Barwick of BBC Sport says. "It gives people something to talk about in the pub and at work the next day."
FOR David Elstein, Sky's head of programming, such considerations are part of the sentimental past. "I love this notion of the collective experience," he says with gentle scorn. "Before Gutbuberg we only had one book, and it was read out in church every Sunday. That was the collective experience. Did Gutenberg destroy that? No. The Bible is still the world's best-selling book."
But do people still go to church to hear it read? Despite the rising attendances, Nick Hornby sees a danger in a change of the mood inside the grounds.
"The atmosphere was better before," he said. "What's killing the game is the depth of silence that has descended on a lot of grounds
All-seater stadiums were inevitable and necessary, but the clubs had the choice of whether or not to break up the groups of supporters and alienate them, and that's what they chose to do. It's important to remember that the reason television has been interested in football is because of the atmosphere. It's not going to be much good to them if it's just a lot of zombies sitting there."
In the short term TV will continue to make football rich beyond its wildest dreams. Ten years ago the BBC and ITV were carving up the whole of the English professional game for less than £3 million a year between them; bidding for the next Premier League TV, contract will start at around £100 million a year, and may go much higher. One effect will be to give another huge boost to the players' salaries, helped by the dismantling of the system whereby a club was entitled to negotiate a transfer fee for a player at the end of his contract. The Bosman ruling, named after the Belgian player who successfully challenged the system in the European Court of Justice, means that there is more money to offer the players in the form of salaries, although smaller clubs - accustomed to the revenue from selling on their starlets - are bound to suffer.
But who cares about small clubs? There are currently two Premier League clubs with stock market listings; many more, watching Manchester United's profits soar, will follow suit, their fans unaware of the sole duty of a publicly-quoted operation, which is to deliver the biggest possible profits to its shareholders. Such a club has not merely the right but the obligation to push its prices - for tickets, replica shirts, and broadcasting rights - as high as the market will stand.
Some pessimists say that football has created a false market for itself. There's no such thing, according to Rick Parry, the Premier League's chief executive. "It's a market, that's all. But we've got to be careful that we don't overheat completely."
Hornby sees evidence of overheating at Arsenal, where the arrival of David Platt and Dennis, Bergkamp from Italy last summer brought a flood of season ticket applications. "The place went crazy, he says. "But what are they going to do this year?, If you've got to spend £11 million on players every season to keep the interest going, you're in trouble."
But he doesn't think the middleclass interest is temporary. "I think it's real in the way that Fever Pitch was real. These people aren't inventing an interest. Michael Nyman has been going to football for a long time, just like I have."
Graham Kelly wants football to remember that success brings obligations. "The last time this happened, when the money shot up in the boom of the late 1970s, I believe the game tended to lose contact with its community base, he said. "A lot of hard work has gone into re-establishing that.
"Football must remember to keep in touch with reality. although that might be quite difficult when you look at the money involved. And we're going to become dependent on it, which is a big danger. Football has got to recognise that there may indeed be a time when television isn't falling over itself to get its hands on the game. We won't be in the land of milk and honey forever."
Back at Soccerex `96, a man from Coca-Cola was describing the sponsor's relationship to the sport. "We're buying access to a set of emotions that these people exclusively own," he said. But who really holds the lease on a game, and can its dreams be rented out?