English FA Premiership: Kevin McCarraon the treatment Ashley Cole can expect when Arsenal reach Stamford Bridge tomorrow.

At a club where a great deal of cash gets flashed the notes brandished in the Stamford Bridge stands tomorrow will actually be in the hands of Arsenal fans chastising their former defender Ashley Cole. That show of fake currency is unlikely to make him cringe. The Chelsea left back is so brash he failed to understand that an autobiography is meant to show a person in a favourable light, not encourage stereotypes about grasping sportsmen.

Cole, all the same, is practical on the pitch and likely to be stimulated by any derision that he makes out above the noise of the home support. Footballers reach a high level only by being geared to proving their worth constantly, even if the threat normally comes from opposing players.

The rage of supposedly betrayed fans has become a normal element of the game's emotions over the past generation or two as the strength of contracts and relationships has been diluted.

One extreme episode did see a fight break out in a Southampton restaurant after Danny Wallace had completed a transfer to Manchester United. His wife fractured a finger and another woman broke an arm but Wallace blamed random "idiots" rather than the Southampton support at large.

Gordon McQueen, who crossed the Pennines with Joe Jordan in 1978 by switching from Leeds United to Manchester United, feels supporters are getting accustomed to deals of this nature, even if they resent them. The Bosman ruling not only licensed players to leave under freedom of contract but also obliged clubs to plan on selling employees while there was still a fee to be had.

"It was bigger news in my day," said McQueen. "The movement is much greater in the modern game, where everything is loaded in the player's favour. Everyone remembers cases like Sol Campbell's when he went to Arsenal."

That piece of north London relocation may have been weighing yesterday on the mind of the person who extracted the defender from Spurs for nothing in 2001. The Arsenal manager aimed to discourage vilification of Cole.

"What you want is for him to continue his career in a decent way and go as far as he can, which I'm sure he will do," said Arsene Wenger. "I think he appreciates already what he's done for the club and what the club have done for him. I've never blocked somebody who really wanted to go and that doesn't stop me from thinking he did well for us.

"I feel we have a responsibility to calm that (hostility) before the game. I can understand the (supporters') point of view but recently we had a dead guy at a (Paris Saint-Germain) football game and that's not what it is made for. I would be happy if Chelsea against Arsenal is a fantastic game. I would like there not to be any stupid aggression but a feast for football, like it can be in England."

This is a noble if doomed aspiration but generally the Premiership does seem to control its own penchant for malice. No one here has yet had an experience to compare with that of Luis Figo, who had the effrontery to try to take a corner when he came back to Barcelona in Real Madrid's colours four years ago. He was hindered by a rain of objects, including a whisky bottle and a pig's head, before both teams left the field for 10 minutes. The then Barcelona president, Joan Gaspart, blamed Figo's "provocation".

It is more common for supporters to negotiate some sort of accommodation between their fury and a gnawing realism. Footballers, too, can develop some sort of protocol. Campbell went down the tunnel quickly at White Hart Lane when the 2004 Premiership title was clinched and left the rest of the Arsenal squad to celebrate.

Players are rarely so fearful as to shun a transfer to an historic adversary.

"That never came into the equation," McQueen admitted. "I felt Leeds had lost something and were only heading in one direction."

Peter Beardsley, who left for Everton when Liverpool no longer wanted him, does not believe Cole's ordeal tomorrow will be repeated constantly. "In his and Chelsea's case I'm sure he'll just want to get this game over. The first time you play against your old club is when everyone's passions are at their most intense. When Arsenal and Chelsea meet again after this it won't ever seem quite so raw or important to Cole or the fans."

Beardsley's prediction is understating the loathing that has been stored up for next year's return at the Emirates Stadium but the evidence does bear him out on the whole.

Republic of Ireland striker Clinton Morrison, who returned to Selhurst Park as a Birmingham forward, takes a similar stance. "I couldn't really hear what the Palace fans were saying to me," he remembers. "If I missed a chance, there were a few getting on it and there were boos when I got substituted. It was only a minority, though."

Just as Figo suffered more because he was a supposed traitor to the Catalan cause, so players in general are at true risk only if there are issues at stake beyond sporting allegiance. When Maurice Johnston changed his mind about returning to Celtic in 1989 and signed for Rangers instead the step across a religious divide multiplied the enmity. Some fans at his new club burned their season tickets in protest at the purchase of a Catholic. Johnston himself lived in Edinburgh, 40 miles from Glasgow. He eventually put himself an ocean apart and now manages Toronto FC.

Cole should never get the feeling that emigration is prudent. Jim Smith was Harry Redknapp's assistant when they braved the Portsmouth crowd by coming back as Southampton's management team in April 2005. "You would have thought we were about to get shot from all the fuss there was," he said. "It wasn't that bad." Then he muses that this might have been because Southampton were crushed 4-1.

Cole would certainly not be agreeable to making his peace with Arsenal by losing to them.

• Guardian Service