Grounds for complaint...

Almost half of the teams currently playing in the Premiership have grounds that were built in the past 20 years. A handful of others are in old grounds, but which have been changed beyond all recognition from 30 years ago. A few more are desperate to move to new stadiums, with some plans already in place and others floundering on the wave of a recession. We, the fans, are never consulted on these things. Much in the way that everybody knows what the result of a referendum to bring back hanging would be, everybody knows what answers fans would give to moving grounds. Unless, of course, you are a Liverpool fan, who seem willing to move into a caravan whilst the new one is being haggled over.

History, it seems, has no place and no value.

But what is this obsession with "improving" stadiums (I'd say "stadia" but that the word just sounds a bit Deloitte and Touche)? You never hear a good word about a new ground from anybody who attended an old one, and the issue of terracing has never gone away, much to the annoyance of both clubs and the FA. After all, if we had terraces how would the greedy, corporate-driven clubs be able to justify charging up to 50 quid to watch just an hour and a half of football which isn't even guaranteed to be of average quality, never mind good?

Sadly, this isn't just an English phenomenon. I watched my first baseball game in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1996 and my last in Boston in 2007.

At the Royals Stadium in KC, I was mightily impressed with the stadium in many ways. It was new and very, very big. What it lacked, as so many do, was any sense of attachment. I felt like a customer who was being catered to, rather than a fan who was there to watch simply because I wanted to. The stadium has now been renamed the Kauffman Stadium, after the long time Royals owner (sound familiar?) and has been extended and modernised, despite only being 30 odd years old.

The New York Yankees have rebuilt Yankee Stadium, a place where more sporting history has been created than almost anywhere else on earth. It's true that they built the new one to exactly the same dimensions as the old, but it's still a new stadium. The House that Ruth Built is now the House that Steinbrenner Demolished.

In contrast, a trip to Fenway Park, Boston is a trip back to a time when the working man could still afford watching his favourite sport and the 'baccy juice was flying left right and centre. I don't remember what we paid for tickets that night but, even now, the cheapest ticket at Fenway is still only $12, or about £7. That's right, 7 quid for a ticket to a game which will last about 2 1/2 hours. Granted, the cheap tickets are quite a distance from home plate, but even those in much better stands are only $30, or about £18. Oh, and there's terracing, too. Other objections to the new Yankee Stadium aside, they haven't tried to make the fans pay for the move. The cheapest bleacher seats are just $5, about the price of a pie at Goodison. Compare this to the Emirates Stadium, which has tickets that are, on average, twice as dear as at Highbury.

Fenway - along with Wrigley Field in Chicago - is, quite rightly, seen as a national treasure, and the notion of the Red Sox ever moving out is unthinkable. There are pillars everywhere, supporting the upper tiers, and the stadium is surrounded by buildings, in the same way many English football grounds used to be, before the obsession with retail parks and hotels started. This restricts crowd numbers, but none of that matters. This is Fenway, and it will take an earthquake to bring it down.

It's sad that football clubs can't think the same way. Of course, the spiralling debts created by chairmen chasing an impossible dream means that many grounds just aren't/weren't big enough. I mean, how do you finance half a billion pounds worth of debt, if you've only got 40,000 people turning up for 19 games a season? Well, you start by charging exorbitant ticket prices knowing that, when your own fans stop turning up, there'll be a stream of Japanese and Scandinavians queuing up to take their places.

Football, as we knew it, is all but dead in this country. The stadiums are soulless, bland, flatpack affairs with barely even a nod to history. When it comes crashing down, and it will, who do you think the clubs will turn to?