You may have noticed that the professional football season started last weekend.

It’s hard to avoid noticing.

The hype around the sport is so high a man is somehow less if he can’t go into details about that day’s matches in the pub with his mates, or the next morning with his workmates.

Thank goodness for the Cricket World Cup which kept football out of the back page headlines earlier this summer.

For about a month other sports had their chance to be in the spotlight.

Now we have 11 endless months of non-stop football hype in front of us.

Players will be heroes if they score the winning goal, villains if they are responsible for the pass that concedes the winning goal.

Pundits will wheel out whole thesauruses of superlatives at the slightest opportunity.

Pity the poor referees who will be called Satan incarnate by at least one club manager or the fans – or both - every weekend.

But the emphasis for professional football stopped being on sport a long time ago.

Professional football is big business.

If an economist decided to quantify the effect of football on the country’s economy - I say if, someone probably has already done so for a university doctorate thesis - they will discover a vast number of people making money out of football.

Excluding the players themselves, there are their agents; the companies that provide stadium and match day services, including those matchday pies, edible and otherwise; pubs near the grounds; pubs across the country with television screens; coach and train companies conveying teams and supporters back and forth; manufacturers and sellers of team strips and balls with team logos on them; television companies that broadcast the matches; all the companies that get leading players to endorse their products whether sport related or otherwise; and so on.

A basic law of economics is that the more buyers there are for a product, the higher the seller can hike the price.

So all the companies involved have a vested interest in supporting the hype, because it encourages more people to become customers, thus enabling them to push up their prices.

Ultimately all the money comes from one place – fans.

Fans stump up time and time again to fill the coffers of all the companies I listed above.

Even club sponsors hope the advertising exposure will persuade fans to buy their products. Why else do they sponsor clubs?

Want to watch football on Sky, for instance? That’s a minimum of £42 a month with the current special offer because Sky won’t let you buy just the football channels.

Deep in the small print is the warning the price could go up at any time and you have to commit to pay whatever Sky decrees for 18 months.

At the heart of the industry are the clubs who rake in season and match ticket sales, but still can’t manage to cover the astronomical salaries demanded by leading players.

The players say they are worth it – maybe they read the acres of praise devoted to them in every national paper.

The clubs say the players merit such payments because they are the people that bring in the big bucks - the television fees, season ticket payments and the match day crowds.

What they really mean is that these are the players who, they hope, will ensure they stay in or are promoted to the big money divisions.

Clubs that get relegated face major financial problems – ask York City about its finances since falling out of the Football League.

The monetary stakes are so high these days, failure is not tolerated, a view reinforced by all the hype.

Success justifies everything, even if the team is one of those that specialises in brutal tackles, shoves off the ball and over dramatic falls to try and get an unjustified penalty or an opposition player yellow or red carded.

So ultimately the fans lose twice over.

They lose money on inflated prices to make other people rich – and they lose in sporting terms. Football is no longer about the beauty of the beautiful game; two teams playing within a set of rules and within the spirit of the rules, to see who is better on the day.

Football is an afternoon’s entertainment and that is all it should be.

On behalf of all non-football fans, may I say: If only it was.