The House of Payne: Empty seats may greet Olympic footballers (From Surrey Comet)

The House of Payne: Empty seats may greet Olympic footballers

12:07pm Friday 10th February 2012 in Headlines By John Payne

Should football care about being the only sport among the 26 at London 2012 which has not sold out?

Although only a third of the 2.5m available tickets have so far been taken up, the 800,000 that have been sold means more people will be attending football than anything else.

But I’m sure I’m not the only person who failed to muster much excitement when my original ticket application for tennis at Wimbledon, rowing, athletics, swimming and the rest all got rejected... and I just ended up with some preliminary round football on a Wednesday afternoon at Wembley.

It is easy for organisers Locog to say that people are waiting for April’s draw before they decide whether to buy tickets.

But, with prices ranging from a reasonable £20 to a barmy £125, I suspect there will be plenty of empty seats at matches not involving the cobbled together Great Britain team.

Why? As Malcolm Clarke, chairman of the Football Supporters’ Federation, points out, the Olympics is hardly the pinnacle of the sport.

The European Championships have more kudos and will take priority for the nations involved, which means the GB team should largely be made up of the outstanding current Welsh crop of players and some young Englishmen who miss out on the flight to Poland and the Ukraine.

I suspect there is a deeper issue. Football seems to be reaching saturation point.

Turn on the TV any night of the week and you get yet another game... and on Monday the most talked about incident in the Liverpool v Spurs draw was a cat running on to the pitch.

You can’t move for the same old football stories and I think people are fed up, with players earning bigger salaries than bankers, the John Terry saga, Liverpool fans treating Luis Suarez as a hero, players showing referees no respect and referees making hopelessly inconsistent decisions.

The action on the pitch – as evidenced in Chelsea’s remarkable 3-3 draw with Manchester United rather than the Anfield bore – is more exciting than it was in 1990.

But the characters involved are becoming ever more aloof and difficult to like.

It’s easier to associate with the likes of Chris Robshaw and the England rugby team. Their victory over Scotland at Murrayfield was not as great a spectacle as the one at Stamford Bridge, but it felt more real.