The really bad news is that this is all a bit like Brexit. And that in itself will be enough to stop many of you reading any further.

If you are one of those people that voted Leave and you are not so sure anymore, I’m afraid the chance to register your change of mind may never come. I don’t recall there ever being a referendum about paying to watch every televised Premier League game but by forking out consistently for the last 20-odd years, we have all shown a level of complicity that could be difficult to reverse now.

You see, just like the Arron Banks millions, the money has already been spent. I’m afraid you had your chance when Richard Keys introduced the first Sky Strikers’ half-time pom-pom routine. You should have said then that you were already missing Elton Welsby and Gary Newbon.

Not only was every top division football statistic reset to zero that day in 1992, but the means of adding zeros to players’ off-shore accounts was rewritten too. If you now choose to march on Parliament – and can somehow fight your way through all the political reporters from pay news channels – be careful what you wish for. They are the ones paying your heroes’ wages. You’re not.

Even after a pie and a pint at Mayfair prices, the match-day contribution of loyal ticket-buying customers is completely dwarfed by broadcast and commercial revenue in the annual accounts of all major clubs. The dreaded bottom line is that the price for seeing a return of Premier League football to our free channels could be the return of Darren Bent and Rickie Lambert to an attack near you.

But wait a minute. Aren’t I that ITV commentator? Aren’t I the bloke that’s always bleating to Hawksbee and Jacobs about the bumper viewing figures that terrestrial television delivers? Aren’t I old enough to remember the away team running out first? Shouldn’t I be shaking the same rattle as Johnny Nic?

Yes, yes, yes and well, yes. Like John, I think football has taken its public for granted for far too long and that the blind faith that season ticket-paying fans are relied on to show in their team’s future has been worn thin by the steady ‘subscriptionising’ of football support. I’m just not sure that there is any way back now.

Or there is, but it’s not one that football will like. More of that in a moment.

I may qualify for a Senior Railcard but I’m not quite so grumpy yet that I can’t find a lot to love about football in 2019. Most of the TV billions have, as John writes, gone to ‘create a greedy inflation spiral which has sent wages and transfer fees through the roof, along with the real cost of tickets to fans’. Fact, as Rafa would say.

But to argue that ‘nobody has really gained, apart from players, managers and agents’ is to slightly devalue the pleasure and, at times, privilege of seeing Aguero, Van Dijk and De Gea in our midst. Not to mention when the Champions League brings Messi and Ronaldo to town. Or to our living rooms.

Every sport you can measure keeps advancing. I think you’ve got to be the kind of sentimental fool that still goes to bed with his Blue Peter badge on and falls asleep to the Moody Blues to pretend that football has gone backwards.

The only trouble with footballers today is that they want paying. And, unlike public service workers in America, they have representatives who can be pretty insistent about the money arriving on time.

The great brands of world football (oh no, he’s going to use the word ‘franchise’ in a moment!) are built on cash flow. The richest clubs on the planet can service debts that would make Philip Hammond wince as long as the next cheque is clearing. The future can wait as long as the present can be financed.

Rugby Union cannot take its public for granted like football does. So, while the home unions bank the Sky dollar as gratefully as football for the autumn internationals, they keep their flagship Six Nations Championship free to air on BBC and ITV. Saturday’s Ireland-England game attracted over eight million viewers at peak – four times as many as watched either of the Super Sunday afternoon Premier league matches on Sky.

Rugby needs the oxygen of mass exposure to keep the game alive at grass roots level. One day football might.

To be fair to the much-criticised ‘blazers’ at the FA, they have seen the same light. All of England’s European Championship qualifiers will be live on ITV and the pick of the FA Cup ties are screened live on BBC. Again, the viewing figures will be much higher than for the Nations League matches on Sky or the other FA Cup games that BT show.

That’s not a boast, it’s simply a question of availability and reach. Sky’s coverage of the Spurs-United Premier League match topped three million when all the platforms were rounded up. The satellite football coverage in the UK is hardly ‘niche’, it’s just never going to hit Strictly, Jungle or Southgate levels. There is little doubt that a sport enjoys a more rounded airing when there is a choice, a combination of ‘free’ and ‘pay’.

UEFA followed that model throughout the first couple of decades of the Champions League. Their policy was always to split the television rights between a terrestrial and a satellite channel in each country. But all the value of today’s rights is in exclusivity.

The big broadcast bucks are available for sole ownership of content. Champions League football is now available exclusively to paying customers in France, Germany, Spain and the UK. If you want to watch the games for free, you need to move to Azerbaijan, Moldova or Kazakhstan.

Or alternatively, improvise. And this is where we come to the u-turn that football won’t like, the one it won’t make of its own accord.

That push towards exclusivity for subscription channels came from mainland European clubs getting sweaty about the money their English Premier league counterparts were raking in from domestic telly deals. It was the Milans and the Munichs that pushed UEFA to raise more money for less exposure. More here and now for less long-term impact. Messi and Ronaldo needed paying, or Eddie Howe and Chris Hughton would soon be tapping them up.

The rush to cash in on the Champions League’s glitter and gold is fine for as long as it sparkles. The real lustre of gold is in its weight, not its look. You can pay too much for it, you know. The smart traders sell when they make a mistake.

I guess I must sound like some hard-nosed cynic when set against Johnny Nic’s more utopian view of our precious game. Not so. I’m a hopeless romantic about football. I can get misty-eyed sitting in an empty stadium four hours before kick-off.

I don’t need asking twice to support the kind of initiatives that the FSF and Kick It Out and the ESFA champion in order to protect and promote the spirit of a game that got me when I was too small to see much at all from the Main Stand Paddock.

Because of my profession, I will always defend the part that armchair viewers play in football’s vaunted place in national life. The 93-year old dad that first lifted me over a turnstile still counts as a valued fan just like he did when he never used to miss a game. Television and the wider media keep the football pot simmering.

If the value of television rights is eroded by illegal streaming, by bite-sized viewing habits that spool past the advertisers, by pub watching that minimises the impact of the sponsors or by a weary familiarity from watching Barcelona play Juventus yet again… well, maybe, just maybe, those media barons that are paying the players’ wages will decide to pay some other performers’ wages instead.

Then it may be the Glazers and the Mansours who are saying – to quote John Nicholson – ‘what the f**k is going on?’.

Clive Tyldesley

Football365 has donated to the Sean Cox fund – at the request of the wonderful Clive.