Many years ago, when I was an awful lot younger, I studied economics. I have, somewhere in a cupboard, a nice piece of paper to prove it, saying that, all in all, I did okay. Not great, not even all that good. But okay.

One of the first subjects covered in that course, and the one that sticks firmly in my memory, dealt with demand. I had before me a textbook that stated, clearly and unambiguously, that a consumer looks for the most gain at the best price, and gave the example of choosing a film you expect to enjoy if you go to the cinema. After all, if you have a certain amount of money to spend on entertainment, on pleasure, it is natural - inevitable - that you would spend that money in a way that can be most relied upon to provide that entertainment, that pleasure. So a good film, a nice meal, a holiday to somewhere that appeals to you. The idea of paying in the knowledge that misery and frustration, discomfort and disappointment, were a real possibility was inconceivable; the laws of demand forbade it.

Graphs were drawn, tables composed, formulae computed, showing clearly the relationship between demand and the expected benefit gained from a product of service. And so, I wrote an essay, short and to the point, showing how paying to watch your side lose doesn't fit into this, but an awful lot of people do it every week. Not surprisingly, it brought me no end of trouble. Irrational, they said. It doesn't fit the curve.

So, I ask you, why do you insist on breaking the laws of demand every week? Why do you spend a vast sum of money each year on a season's worth of tickets with the guarantee that at least some of those tickets will be to see failure? A 100% chance that some of those tickets will leave you coming home disappointed and frustrated - what would make you act so, well, irrationally?

I'm guessing you didn't have to think about it for very long. Not one person who has ever even considered buying a season ticket, whether for Liverpool, Accrington Stanley or whomever, did so in the hope of a constant stream of unbroken joy. We do not go to be entertained; we'd like to be, sure, and sometimes we are, but fundamentally, that's not the point. Never has been. Never will be. It means more. It means something.

Do you remember when this first dawned on you? Long time ago, probably. Chances are you knew someone older, father, brother, friend, whatever, someone who knew what it meant already. So you start going, and you keep going, and, as far as you possibly can, you keep going forever more.

But what if it had never happened? What if the idea had never dawned on you? What if following a football team meant watching them on telly, maybe popping along for the 'experience' once or twice a year? Maybe your father/brother/friend goes regularly, but he can't afford to take anyone with him, and his world seems as remote as those of the players. Interesting, certainly, but you've never lived that way, and wouldn't know how to start.

What, then, would lead you to develop the 'experience' into a forty, fifty, occasionally even sixty game-a-season obsession, at huge cost, and in breach of those laws of demand? Why, in short, would you bother?

There is not a professional club in the country who has not dug this hole for themselves. Of course, for the Premier League sides (whether permanent, transitory or aspiring), the hole is much deeper. But it's there nonetheless, waiting for a generation to pass before snaring your team, my team, everybody's team.

Some clubs - Man Utd, primarily - have enough occasional fans to weather the storm. But a great number of sides are rushing headlong into harm, unwilling and unable to stop, if only because everyone else is doing it.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. Everyone else is doing it? The powers that be in our game (and it is still OUR game, albeit barely) are acting like schoolchildren. Where else would you find a business, some massively successful and internationally famous, that bases its entire financial plan on what everyone else is doing, even in the knowledge that it must leave to catastrophe in the non-too-distant future?

There is a way out of this, and a way that does actually fit in with established economic norms. The big word is investment. Choosing to forgo a portion of profits, an element of success, in order to build a future that is even more successful. There is not a solitary company on the FTSE 100 for whom this would be an alien concept; yet in football it's seen as unthinkable. This has to change, and URGENTLY. And the power to change is there; after all, there are perhaps as many as 91 league clubs who stand to lose massively from the problems being constructed today. With near unanimity amongst clubs in this respect, there would not be the fear that one club would face if they went out on their own. Long-termism is only a safe approach if everyone else is looking to the long-term - and then,