The entertainment on offer at the City of Manchester Stadium, the replacement for Stuart Hall's much-loved Theatre of Base Comedy, has been rather turgid of late but all that is set to change. Whereas Manchester City supporters have only been moved to get out of their seats and holler as the final whistle approaches, Rod Stewart fans will be quite literally dancing in the aisles come 28 June.

OK, those fans may not be forever young like their favourite, or jig about as much as fans of previous star turns such as Oasis, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Nicolas Anelka, but they will at least get off their backsides for the duration of the performance and show their appreciation. How Stuart Pearce could use such "atmosphere" right now.

The irony of the stadium being used as a venue for the Peter Pan of pop rock will not be lost on City fan Phill Gatenby, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Stewart will no doubt name-check his love for United. The real reason for Gatenby’s resigned shrug, raised eyebrows or whatever it is he does to register irony, is that he has been campaigning for the return of safe standing at English grounds for over seven years.

Gatenby is currently heading the Football Supporters’ Federation effort to bring the issue back in from the deep freezer it was sent to by the Taylor Report – the inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster which resulted in the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans.

He (and a great many football fans, if surveys are to be believed) thinks it is time to re-examine the issue of standing at football matches and I think he has a point.

Football fans can’t be trusted to stand at the City of the Manchester Stadium but music fans can – that’s got to be nonsense, hasn’t it? And if that isn’t a flagrant enough case of double standards and old-fashioned stereotyping, why is it “safe” for rugby league, rugby union, speedway and football below the Championship to have standing areas?

Why does the government consider it safe to let people stand on the bus or in the corridors of high-speed trains but not the Bobby Moore Lower, Kop or Stretford End?

As for the complete horlicks of a compromise that is the fact that Cardiff City and Plymouth Argyle fans are allowed to stand in the Championship for three years but not a fourth…well, don’t get me started.

Nobody who remembers the television pictures of 15 April 1989, let alone anybody with a closer connection to the event, will need reminding of the appalling scenes they witnessed that day. It was a tragedy, but it was also a disgrace. And that was the true finding of Lord Taylor’s inquiry.

The cause of what happened in Sheffield was a combination of inadequate facilities and, most importantly, bad policing and almost non-existent stewarding. The result of the report, however, was the removal of perimeter fencing and the move towards all-seater stadia.

With a national mood of disgust and shame at what had happened (and the hooligan-stained years that had preceded Hillsborough), it almost went unnoticed that football was perhaps throwing out the baby with the bath water when it demanded plastic seats to be bolted on to famous terraces for safety reasons.

But then getting fans to sit down was never really about safety per se: it was about control. It is easier to monitor a person’s behaviour when you have sold them a ticket for an allocated seat than it is if they are somewhere among 15,000 people on a terrace.

There is a school of thought that says the move to all-seaters was a plot by the football authorities to raise prices, get a better class of customer through the gates and generally present a more modern face to the world. Hence the Premier League, the “prawn sandwich brigade” and cheerleaders at half-time.

But I prefer accidental combinations of factors as opposed to conspiracies for explaining most trends. Grounds before Hillsborough were accidents waiting to happen and needed to be upgraded. Hooliganism was rife and the terraces gave hooligans anonymity. A decade of Thatcherism was seeing a nation become more middle-class and less tolerant of second-rate services. Satellite television was coming and it needed a shiny new product to tempt people to pay for something they had previously got for free. And then there was Hillsborough itself – 96 people died on an old-fashioned terrace, therefore old-fashioned terraces must go.

So where does that leave us now, almost 18 years later?

Well, on the upside, there are lots of new grounds with clean toilets and even cleaner sight lines, more female and ethnic minority fans, and the players on show are better, but then they should be as the talent pool they are being selected from has widened considerably.

On the downside, we have unhappiness about ticket prices and cynicism about the sterility of many top-flight matches. The mega-bucks Premier League should be worried about two numbers I got from pro-standing group Stand Up Sit Down (SUSD) – only 9% of crowds at PL games now are under 24 and the average age of a supporter at those games is 45. Priced out and bored, the young are staying away.

We seem to have lost too much of what made going to a football match so attractive – the joy of interacting with and responding to an unpredictable drama with hundreds of like-minded people, without being told to sit down by stewards or feeling guilty for blocking the views of people unable or unwilling to respond and interact in the same way.

And it is on this last point that SUSD is campaigning for “a common-sense solution” - letting fans in certain parts of the ground do what they want to do anyway, stand up. It is a low-cost answer in that it doesn’t require clubs to rip out their seats, and concerns over “cascade effect” injuries from fans toppling down the stands are not supported by the statistics – and they are certainly no more of a factor than they would be at, say, a Rod Stewart concert.

My view on this is that it is a bit of fudge, but a sensible fudge. I would prefer to stand on modern, properly maintained terraces without the potential hazard of a seat in my way, but I agree with SUSD that the freedom to choose would be nice.

The official line from the Department of Media, Culture and Sport and the body it set up to implement the Taylor Report, the Football Licensing Authority, is that all-seater stadia are still the best way to ensure safety and public order. And they say no new evidence has been presented to suggest otherwise.

They may have a case on the first part of that equation but their unwillingness to enter into debate on the matter makes me suspicious that they know the safety defence is flawed. The worst injuries I have sustained at a football match have been bruised knees from knocking into the seats.

I think football culture in this country has moved on (and yes I do say that in full awareness of the trouble that occurred between two sets of thugs a mile from Stamford Bridge on Sunday). I also think the DCMS stance is compromised by its inconsistent treatment of people when at football matches as opposed to any other form of entertainment, sporting or otherwise.

And most importantly, I think there is a working example of how standing can be reintroduced to British football: the Bundesliga, and this brings me back to the FSF’s Phill Gatenby.

He has just returned from a trip to Germany where he saw games at three leading stadia (which were good enough for Fifa) that have a combined standing area of over 50,000 places and an average ticket price (that also gets you free travel on game day) for adults of about £7.

If it is working over there, why can’t it work here?