PREMIER LEAGUE:For all the smiley PR, football's powerbrokers regard supporters as little more than an irksome inconvenience, writes Andrew Fifield
HERE'S A thing. A New York-based friend and I were talking recently about the differences between following sport on either side of the Pond, when he told me something genuinely shocking.
"American sports fans never boo their players," he said. "When they're annoyed, they shout 'Moose' instead. It sounds a bit like booing, but it means they can't be accused of being too negative."
It comes to something when the world's self-proclaimed greatest democracy appears so gosh darn terrified of even the tamest public manifestations of criticism, but if you ever needed proof of why Americans will never truly understand sporting culture on this side of the Atlantic, that is it.
Where a Yank will signal his disapproval by bellowing the name of Canada's most beloved horned mammal, over here things are rather more fruity. In the last 10 days alone, we have seen one of the Premier League's biggest stars - Ashley Cole - mercilessly taunted by his international crowd, a linesman felled by a coin thrown at one of our most popular and long-serving managers and sizeable terrace rucks flaring up at Arsenal and Millwall.
This has provoked an inevitable bout of tut-tutting from the moral majority, although it seems crass to lump all the incidents together. Cole, for example, must fear a barrage of verbal abuse every time he sticks his head out of his front door, given most people would probably buy a Chelsea season ticket just to have something to throw at him.
He could spend the rest of his life caring for sick kittens in Somalia and it would still not banish the memories of his breathtakingly smug National Lottery adverts, leering creepily in that grotesque white suit, or christening a €70,000-a-week Arsenal contract offer "an insult" in his thunderously absurd autobiography.
With that in mind, a chorus of boos on the back of a mistake which would have embarrassed an eight-year-old might be considered lenient.
There is no sense in comparing Wembley's panto moment to the genuinely poisonous abuse meted out to Sol Campbell by Tottenham supporters at Fratton Park last month, or even the thuggish behaviour in London, Birmingham and Sheffield last weekend.
If these incidents do belong on the same behavioural spectrum, however, we should be attempting to understand their root cause rather than simply bewailing the rebirth of "the English disease".
Envy comes into it, of course. Joe Public, having scrimped and saved for the privilege of wedging his behind onto a plastic bucket seat hundreds of metres above sea level, sees Cole, with his telephone number salary, pop muppet girlfriend and champagne lifestyle, and is resentful when he can't concentrate for 90 minutes against Kazakhstan.
But the antipathy is not just down to jealousy. There is something more fundamental, more deep-rooted poisoning the attitudes of fans towards the Premier League, and it stems from feeling utterly, helplessly disengaged from a sport which was once theirs.
Put simply, fans have never been so disenfranchised. They are treated like fools by players who grasp the badge with one hand while signing a pre-contract agreement with another, by clubs who would rather serve up meaningless PR puff than unpalatable truths, and television companies who think nothing of making them travel hundreds of miles at godforsaken hours in order to cram another game into an already bulging schedule.
The sense of detachment is partly down to cold, hard economics, for in a world where money talks, the average punter can barely make his voice heard. The days are long gone when a waspish outburst from the stands could be justified with the rejoinder: "I pay your wages."
The amount of cash accrued by clubs through season ticket and walk-up ticket sales is minuscule compared to the sums raked in by the TV rights package, which yielded €2.2 billion when it was signed in 2006.
Similarly, the only fans who really matter - to the accountants, at least - are those who fork out thousands at a time for corporate boxes and whose idea of a perfect pre-match tipple is a chilled glass of Chablis.
For all the happy, smiley PR, it has been evident for some time now that football's new powerbrokers regard supporters as little more than an irksome inconvenience: useful for providing background colour for the TV cameras, but precious little else.
Why else would Richard Scudamore decide he could hawk his precious product to the highest bidders in return for a 39th game, without giving even the least consideration to a consultation process? This, then, is the plight of the modern-day football supporter. Deprived of a voice by the game's administrators, treated with contempt by clubs which have shunned community values for the corporate buck and antagonised by players who live in a world of wealth and luxury beyond comprehension, what else is there to do but boo?
