We're gradually coming round to the idea of Robbie Savage. We know that in his long and illustrious football career he brought new meaning to the term 'annoying', but it takes big cojones to dress in sequins and prance about like a prawn on British television every week.

Football matches come, of course, in all shapes and sizes the critically important and the relatively inconsequential, local derbies steeped in decades of mutual loathing and round-trips which measure thousands of miles and have never been undertaken before. Occasionally, though, context isn't everything.

For adults of a certain age, it is a memory that may have become submerged under the weight of what we have seen since. In the late 1970s, though, British television viewers would get an occasional view of football from a parallel universe in the form of the North American Soccer League. Football in America was different, that much we know for certain.

For the last two decades or so, the entire financial model of professional English football has been based upon on fundamental source of income television money. Ticket prices have increased, of course, but the main driving force behind the wage inflation within the game has come from vastly increased amounts of money coming into the game from the sale of television rights.