With fans ever more distant from players through sheer weight of wedge, the damage to the fabric of football becomes harder to mend. What supporters reckon they are losing is their game. And they know they will never get it back. It is no use pretending that the conglomerate running your club will ever care about you again - if they ever did. They care about their directors' salaries, in the main, and looking after spoilt players who hold them to ransom.
Some players communicate with their supporters in the strangest ways.
Robbie Fowler, for instance. Before they started jumping on him outside clubs in Liverpool recently, they saw in the roguish Fowler an ordinary bloke who was spectacularly good at scoring goals. More so than Uefa did - they fined him. And not long afterwards, Fowler approached Robin Hood status with many fans when he protested that David Seaman had not brought him down illegally in the area. Forced to take the penalty, Fowler hit a weak shot - which Jason McAteer put in from the rebound.