Football clubs. What is the point of them? I pose this as a serious question. I might occasionally ask myself what the point was of making a 500-mile trip to see my team lose on a cold Tuesday night in midwinter, but that’s a different question. What I’m trying to get to the bottom of is what actual purpose a football club does – or should – serve. I don’t know the answer, by the way; I’m trying to work it out as I go along.

In the beginning, I suppose, it was a place people could get together to play football and then for people to come and watch the football being played. At its heart then, it provided one answer to a key question all human beings with time to spare must ask themselves: what shall I do today? That’s no small thing. Neither is what football clubs do to help us exercise our apparent need to develop allegiances to something outside our families – although the teams we support and the families we are part of often feed off each other.