Treveor, I do appreciate your point. But when you are on £100,000 a week (a week!) then somehow that is far different to someone on £500 a week and trying to survive on that.
That a player on £100,000 a week can't afford £500 of that to keep the game going is beyond my comprehension.
Yes, the money coming in from Sky has a lot to do with this by making the game top heavy and thus making it harder for the little clubs to survive. The only ones in position to do anything are the footballers. Most of the owners can't afford anything as they're trying to balance the books paying out these mad wages.
When players were talking about, not too long ago, buying out the clubs that they used to pay for you know that things are wrong. I couldn't work for ICI one minute and then buy them out when I left at 35.
But I do appreciate what you say that players should look after their own but there should be some form of accountablity somewhere. If the league structure loses clubs at the bottom then where will it end up? One possibly scenario is the Major League system of 'sports' in America where the top teams play in their own league and don't get relegated and, more to the point, no-one is allowed to join the top table. There there's money for the top teams and then nothing for the rest; the rest of the sports structures are there as feeder clubs only and that cannot be healthy for any sport.
And we're getting that here with the television money making the big clubs bigger. But when these big clubs, the players and, the bloody agents, aren't doing a thing about the grass roots of the game (and forget the FA they are only interested in jobs for the boys) then the game gets eaten away from both ends at the same time.
And we then have clubs like Hereford go to the wall. These are clubs with some history and now they're gone for the sake of some loose change from a whiparound in the changing rooms of the top clubs in the country.
The sooner that Sky leaves this country the better we'll all be. But until then the game will continue to be poisoned by the imblance of power.