Football Emporium

Imagine this – you are trying to scrape together a tiny profit as your business falls victim to the gradual erosion by taxes of a great British institution – the local pub, and you wake up to find a court summons by a giant multi-billion pound company.
This is what happened to Karen Murphy, a Portsmouth landlady, who had attempted to skirt the alleged Sky bill of over a thousand pounds a month. Okay, using a Greek decoder is obviously going to tick all the company’s necessary boxes before they stick the stamp on the letter, but if the British government doesn’t help an industry that it makes so much money from while crippling it to such an extent that beautiful English heritage Inns are available for the price of a semi-detached, in property auction catalogues up and down the country, at least Europe might.
An advocate of the European Court of Justice has suggested that Ms Murphy should not have to pay the fine and is currently examining the viability of the ruling in the European courts. Julianne Kokott’s argument is that it contravenes a variety of fair trade, cross border laws etc.
The first of football’s public figures to voice an opinion was Sunderland’s multi-millionaire chairman Niall Quinn, “All clubs thrive on full stadiums. Loud, passionate support is the backbone of football and when our stadium is full we are a force to be reckoned with. I know this first hand – when I was a player we could beat teams from the second they walked out of the tunnel, the atmosphere was so intimidating.
"To anyone watching the game illegally in the pub I will continue to say: 'By doing so you're not supporting your team, you're actually damaging the progress of the club.' We have a real chance here to make this club feel great again but to do it we need everyone behind us. I would urge these people in the pubs and clubs to come back to the Stadium of Light. And I reiterate, despite this opinion yesterday, it is still illegal to show games in this fashion."
The cheapest price for admission at Sunderland is £23. Most Premier clubs charge far more.
Sunderland make between £30m and £50m from Sky TV alone, depending on where they finish in the League.
Sunderland, like most Premier League clubs, pay £40,000 per week to individual employees; perhaps more to some.
Well here’s a crazy idea everyone – how about Sky charge pubs a couple of hundred quid a week, clubs charge about £15 quid for their supporters to get in, and players get half the wages – would that make football life for all a better place? 
Okay, maybe four clubs at the top of the thousands in the English football pyramid might have to groom a few more players of their own rather than buy the most highly rated in Europe, but surely it’s better the Closed-Shop-Champions-League-Elite suffer than every other single person with the slightest interest in football in the country.