When I was a little lad my dad took us to home games at Bury, occasionally to his boyhood team Burnley. Bury were usually in the third division and a crowd of five or six thousand was a good turnout. They were contenders for promotion to Division One one year but sadly didn't make it. Burnley was a town surrounded by big clubs, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, both Manc clubs, Liverpool, Everton, Blackpool, Rochdale, Oldham... They were in the first division and won the league in 1960 with a team that cost £9000. They regularly got crowds of 20,000-plus, often more. Without fans, football is nothing. They are not an inconvenience. Most of the games I've watched or listened to (on 5 Live) in the last year have had fake crowd noises. That's how important Sky, BT Sport and the Beeb think that crowds are. The foreign billionaires who rarely come to see their clubs play don't get that. They're fine with people paying a king's ransom for a match ticket or who have to fly all over Europe to see their proposed exhibition games. Football grew from grass roots. It's gone way too far away from that now but at least we still have things like qualification on merit, become the champions on merit and promotion and relegation, as we've always had. If we lose that we've lost the sport and the real fans will vote with their feet. We haven't got away unscathed tonight and these bastards will be back, make no mistake.