Don't know if you are ancient enough to remember the Shoot magazine and the league tables you'd get in the mag at the start of every season. Basically a bit of cardboard with 90 odd slots and 90 odd coloured tabs, one for each team. And you'd move the little tabs up and down according to the 40 odd matches that were all played on Saturday and finished off on Ceefax with it's 7 pages of results and the several minute wait for the roll back to page 1 of 7. 0-1 down, 90 minutes up, but it doesn't say FT yet so there is still hope. There was more anticipation and intensity in those moments than anything I've seen on a pitch in the last decade.
This is what happens when you steal football from eager kids and hand it over to soulless corporations. We'd go out and kick the ball around the street, the match would be temporarily halted if a car had to go past. The driver would tap the horn, not because he was pissed and late for his Yoga combat class but just to say he was there. Might stick his head out the window and ask who was winning. Now the "fun" occurs on XBox with another soulless corporation boasting about how their 2D world is almost like the real thing.
Well we already had the real thing. What we have now is an inferior, ultra-expensive, heartless and mundane knock-off with almost no similarity to the original. Not a football in sight on the streets, because you might hit somebody's expensive car or Mr Health and Safety would get you. You have to wonder how long it can last when there's so little investment at ground level. It's not progress, it's loss replaced by something difference. And it shows each time one of these pampered teams rolls onto the pitch at some weird time that suits the gamblers and fucks the fans.