Falling out of love

Something rather alarming and depressing has happened to me over the past couple of months - I've fallen out of love with the beautiful game. I first realised this when I sat down last Saturday and tried to remember when the last time was that I'd settled down in front of the telly and watched Match of the Day on the Beeb.

It certainly wasn't last week, it definitely wasn't the week before, and I'm pretty confident it wasn't the two or three weeks before them either. This was a pretty shocking revelation, but then I thought about some other supposed facts about my love of football.

I rarely read about it in the papers anymore, instead making a beeline for the rugby, cricket and motorsport sections instead. I only check Football365 as a cursory measure, and really can't be bothered with the 'famous mailbox' anymore. And I've stopped checking the scores on a Saturday or even Sunday evening to see how teams including my own are getting on.

So it's official, I've fallen out of love with football, and I'm pretty sure I know why - it's stopped being a sport and become nothing more than a tradeable commodity. The players salaries to be certain, are obscene, but it's not that which really grates at me.

My big turn-off is that football clubs are no longer football clubs - they're assets, investment vehicles, billionaires playthings, ruled by 'leveraging', 'refinancing' and now today, 'administration'. As if that wasn't enough, my aforementioned own team now devote their entire front page of their website to advertising an 'exclusive' club credit card.

I'm not saying other sports are necessarily better - F1 has been operating on silly money for years, but at least it's trying to address this and make the sport more affordable for teams to enter by slashing budgets.

And then there's the final nail in the coffin for me - football has just become so utterly, utterly predictable and boring. Much has been made this season about the 'fight for fourth place' in the Premier League and how this has reinvigorated the competition and created fresh interest.

The race for fourth place has made it interesting?

Enough said.