Colin Sheridan: what if we bought a football club?

There are worse ways Ireland could squander the money we have sloshing around. 

KERB APPEAL: Owned by the Glazer family, Man Utd have been for sale for some time.

My son, young and impressionable, has reached a critical decision point in his life, deciding as he is which football team to support. Before you rush to judgement, nature has taken care of the things nurture never could. Both he and his sister have abandoned their Mayo roots in lieu of the implied riches they believe following the Gaelic footballers of Galway will bestow upon them. Why they would choose to turn their back on generational trauma is beyond me, but I realise my resistance is pointless, and remain confident my children will be made to look like the fools they obviously are in the coming decades. Eamon Deacy Park, too, must become a regular Friday night appointment. No kid of mine can care about English football before emotionally investing in their local team first. Galway United stand to gain from my principled stance. I just hope they sell a lot of sugar there, otherwise it’ll be a long winter.

The English Problem, however, is proving to be a much more difficult puzzle to solve. Thankfully, he has moved beyond his fleeting support of PSG, a hangover of his first World Cup which introduced him to Messi and Mbappe and the nefarious underworld of state ownership of football clubs. More of that later. As PSG drifted towards irrelevance, so too my son's interest in football, the watching of it anyway. Given the current soulless nature of the industry, I consoled myself that our filial bond would have to be strengthened in other ways, but not watching Match of the Day together. As often occurs, when you give up on something happening, it does. As this Premiership season began, his interest in football returned anew, and with it a dozen questions about the mechanics of soccer supporting.