But hopes of scoring an 844th cup goal, providing a national stage for another local firm or seeing their name in lights again are teetering on a precipice called debt.

With only nine league games to play, the Poppies are facing relegation from the Blue Square Bet Premier - the national division of the Conference - but the prospect of sixth-tier football is the least of their concerns.

I have written about HM Revenue & Customs' royal hump with football so many times I am tempted to ask for a rebate but Kettering Town's tax difficulties do not require much in the way of additional explanation.

Like far too many clubs - at every level - they have existed at the margins of their means for a long time. Financial brinksmanship is fine when you have a friendly bank manager and patient tax authority but football has not seen those for some time.

Kettering took over Rushden & Diamond's Nene Park ground when their Northamptonshire neighbours went bust last season. Photo: Getty Images

There is one slightly unusual, although not unique, element to this story and it is one that underlines the follies of "the football industry".

Last summer, after a breakdown in negotiations with their landlord, Kettering Town decided to leave their Rockingham Road base and move 10 miles to Nene Park, the former home of Rushden & Diamonds. Younger readers might now be mouthing "Rushden & who?"

Well, the Diamonds were an artificial construct that marched up the league pyramid around the turn of the millennium. They did this on the bouncing soles of Max Griggs's money only to fall apart when the Doc Martens magnate withdrew his support.

The 2003 Division Three (League Two in new money) champions went bust in the Conference last year and a phoenix club, AFC R&D, currently play at Raunds Town's ground in the Northants Senior Youth League.

Which brings me back to Kettering Town: nobody will ever know now if a deal could have been reached to stay at Rockingham Road (it seems destined to become a housing estate) but what we do know for certain is Nene Park's impressive car park, comfy corporate boxes and other trimmings cost more to maintain than the Poppies can generate.

Kettering Town's 25-year lease at the £30m house that Max built gave them the "security of tenure" they needed but brought cash-flow issues that could kill them.

In a move that is reminiscent of the possibly apocryphal story about the pricing of the original Mini, Kettering's board reduced prices and sold 1,000 season tickets. Gates at Nene Park have held up but they are barely paying the utility bills.

Given all of this, it is no surprise that a team pushing for promotion to the Football League and forcing a cup replay against Leeds United only two seasons ago is now on the brink.

And with total debts climbing past the £300k mark, players unpaid and the board in turmoil, the taxman decided enough was enough and lodged a winding-up petition in February.

A timely cheque from the club's main sponsor granted the Poppies eight weeks' grace. Those eight weeks are up on 2 April and if the former Cambridge United and Weymouth chairman George Rolls has not completed his takeover by then, they are probably kaput.

There are fans of Cambridge and Weymouth who will say this represents a rock-or-a-hard-place choice. But there are others who might point out that Rolls's time at Cambridge was cut short by club politics and that he saved Weymouth from ruin.

Either way, it does not really matter. The 37-year-old has been running Kettering for some time now and with owner Imraan Ladak desperate to get out - and fans desperate for him to go - it is Rolls or roll over.

To be fair, the former Leyton Orient reserve goalkeeper knows he has an image problem. He might have made a mint in the recruitment business but football has yet to experience his Midas touch.

So it was with this in mind that Rolls agreed to face a gathering of Poppies fans on Wednesday. Assurances were sought and granted and he has managed to convince people who matter - people like former director Ken Samuel, who has been working all season to save his club on a voluntary basis.

Samuel and his colleagues on Kettering's emergency board have performed minor miracles but they know fans throwing change into buckets and fundraising friendlies can only go so far. The club needs real cash and it needs it soon.

Like Rangers, Kettering Town were founded in 1872 and now face an existential threat. Unlike Rangers, nobody outside of the immediate area seems to care that much.

Football, and life, can be cruel like that but I, for one, am wishing the Poppies well and hope other clubs look on and learn.

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Borders' typical customer might write an angry letter about its demise to a broadsheet but they are unlikely to chant obscenities at you for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon. And the death throes of a furniture chain were meat and drink to the Financial Times but they were not the stuff of front-page splashes in the tabloids.

That, however, is the situation Paul Clark and David Whitehouse find themselves in now as the joint administrators of a Scottish institution and global football brand.

The bankruptcies of Borders and MFI were no doubt painful for all concerned, particularly the staff, but they will seem like minor disappointments compared to the apocalyptic gloom that will descend if the Duff & Phelps pair lose Rangers.

A dramatic first fortnight in financial intensive care has convinced some that this will be a long and messy administration, with lots of litigation. But I am now no longer so sure Rangers will be wound up.

It is right to fear the worst for Rangers Football Club plc, but it could be argued that the football team fielded by that company will end up playing football for a company with a very similar name, in the same colours and the same league.

Rangers fans showed their loyalty in the Premier League game against Kilmarnock. Photo: Getty

The Scottish champions spend at least £10m a year more than they bring in, they have almost no chance of being allowed to play European football next year (a situation that will only exacerbate their annual deficit) and they are a few weeks away from being presented with a bill they cannot settle.

That Rangers will lose their appeal against Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in the now infamous "big tax case" is no longer up for real debate. What remains uncertain is how badly they will lose.

Will it be the knockout for HMRC that some have suggested (up to £75m in back taxes, interest and penalties) or a partial defeat of perhaps as little as £10m?

The size, timing and very existence of this tax dispute has been a topic of fevered debate for over a year, so it is hardly surprising that it should take on almost mythical proportions now.

But here's the thing, Rangers' debts are so great that the actual number spat out by the tribunal does not really matter - £10m, £30m, £50m...it is just another 'IOU' to add to the pile.

Rangers are not in administration now because of the reckoning that is coming for their alleged abuse of tax avoidance schemes going back to 2001. They are in the mire now because they have been using "the bank of HMRC" to fund the club's activities since May.

Winning the case is still vital for HMRC (see Tuesday's surprise move against Barclays for further evidence of the taxman's clampdown on those who do not pay their dues) but that has more to do with the City of London than the city of Glasgow.

Rangers, on the other hand, just need this to be over. They need the certainty of a number - it almost does not matter how big that number is.

So forgive me if this sounds like heresy but the big tax case has become a sideshow.

The real issue is how much money can be recovered from this horrible mess. Will taxpayers get a better return from a company that can still sell tickets for games at Ibrox next year or will more money be raised from a fire sale?

A few weeks ago I thought HMRC might opt for the latter, if only to put a great big head on a stick and wave it menacingly at the rest of British football. But the background noises coming from Ibrox, the Revenue and the insolvency industry suggest a compromise is possible.

There are a few important reasons for this.

One, HMRC does not really want to shut down Rangers if it can help it. The political blowback would be considerable and taxpayers could question the logic of the taxman's actions.

Two, there is no football creditor rule in Scotland for HMRC to take its usual principled stance against - millionaire players are not given special treatment in football insolvencies north of the border.

Fans feel deeply upset by the goings on at the club. Photo: Getty

And three, what HMRC really wants is a proper look at all the murky goings-on at Rangers going back a decade. To do this you need the investigatory powers of a liquidator, not the financial restructuring nous of an administrator.

In fact, the taxman needs both and that is exactly what he got at Portsmouth in 2010.

The Premier League's first insolvency ended with a 20p-in-the-pound deal for creditors, the transfer of assets and liabilities to a new company, and the liquidation and investigation of the old company. That process took nine months and the investigation has a long way to go.

A similar deal for Rangers would make Clark and Whitehouse's task of finding a new owner for the club exponentially easier. That owner, or owners, will need the wherewithal to settle the renegotiated debt and that is unlikely without Scottish Premier League football and a timely return to Europe.

A more aggressive liquidation would leave a "new Rangers" outside of Europe for three years and possibly outside Scotland's top flight too. Frankly, there would be no business case to speak of for many, many years.

There is, of course, one stumbling block to this pragmatic solution (I leave aside for now any comment on the sporting ethics of all this) and he is currently holed-up in a posh apartment block in Monaco.

In some ways Craig Whyte is irrelevant to what is happening.

OK, he is playing a convincing and useful role as the baddie in this pantomime. But it is not entirely his fault the club are broke and he certainly cannot be blamed for the Employee Benefit Trust ruse. This storm has been building for some time and it was going to erupt on somebody eventually.

Whyte, however, is relevant to what happens next. Quite simply there is no deal between club and Crown that leaves the erstwhile owner "quids in". He has to go and he cannot be seen to be doing nicely out of this.

But there is one useful service he can still provide and that is to be the template of the kind of person who should fail Scottish football's new "fit and proper person" test, just as soon as they get around to introducing one.

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What links a beautiful town in France, an abattoir in Spain, a legal bill that would bankrupt most developed nations and Luxembourg's greatest sporting triumph?

Come on, you must know this one: it's been running for 566 days.

Actually, now that I think about it, this joke is not very funny.

Contador was found guilty of doping after testing positive for clenbuterol during the 2010 Tour de France but he says the failed test was a result of eating contaminated meat. Photo: Getty

It is a farce, all right. But nobody appears to be laughing, least of all the two main beneficiaries of Alberto Contador’s fall from cycling superstar to biking bad boy . . . a well-worn slide, you could argue, but few have fallen this far and this hard!

But before I get to how Andy Schleck and Michele Scarponi reacted to Monday’s announcement from the Court of Arbitration for Sport that they are the winners of the 2010 Tour de France and 2011 Giro d’Italia respectively, we should rewind to the events of 21 July 2010.

Picture the scene: Contador and his Astana team-mates are getting some well-earned R&R in Pau, the aforementioned nice spot near the Pyrenees.

It is a day off, their first for a week, since which time Contador has taken control of the 97th edition of cycling’s most prestigious and toughest race.

They are now just four days and 300 miles from riding to victory in Paris - Contador’s third win in four years.

So when the Spaniard decided he wanted a choice slice of beef for his dinner, who was going to say he did not deserve it?

Eat up, Alberto, you will need your strength if you are going to maintain your skinny margin over that mountain goat, Schleck.

That much we know. We also know the name of the butcher, the slaughterhouse and even who bought it.

All that is missing is the identity of the cow, which is a huge shame for Contador as that cow has some explaining to do.

Could he/she explain how the asthma drug clenbuterol got into its system?

Could that animal offer an explanation as to what a banned performance-enhancing substance, popular amongst bodybuilders, was doing in its muscle tissue?

No, of course not. But neither could Contador and that is why he is now staring at the ruins of a glittering career.

Having waded through the Lausanne-based court’s 98-page judgement, I was struck by two surprising thoughts.

First, I feel sorry for the lawyers who worked on this case. They had 4,000 pages of evidence to get through.

Second, after all this time and all those arguments, nobody really knows why there was a minuscule amount of clenbuterol in Contador’s urine that day.

The rider says it was the meat what did it.

Cycling’s governing body, the UCI, and the World Anti-Doping Agency say it was the rider, but cannot quite prove how he did it.

The bad news for Bertie, however, is they do not need to prove any of that. They just need to show it was there and then shoot down any suggestion that the cow in question could have been the only animal in western Europe trying to take short cuts for the perfect body.

So, while Contador’s camp could point to the recent cases of tainted meat at football’s Under-17 World Cup in Mexico and tales of farmers doping their animals in China, the UCI and Wada could counter with evidence that, of 24,000 animals tested recently in the European Union, only one showed up with clenbuterol.

Their explanation for the positive was far more plausible, they said.

He either had an illegal blood transfusion the day before the test – and that transfusion got contaminated – or he took a tainted food supplement.

Those two claims ignited enough legal argument to power Switzerland for a few weeks when Contador’s day in court finally came around last November and his hotshot legal team was successful in dismissing the transfusion idea (an aced lie-detector test could only have helped).

But they could not knock enough holes in the suspect supplement theory and this, on the balance of probability, is the explanation that the three-man CAS panel liked best.

Which supplement this was and where had he got it from? Not important.

Under sport’s strict liability rules on doping, Contador had to come up with something more likely than his opponents’ theories and the sirloin was not that.

Some 18 months after the little man with the big lungs crossed the finish line, his sport has a new hero, the mild-mannered Schleck.

Not that he is jumping up and down about it: just the opposite.

For him, this is no way to win and he has made it clear that he believes his great rival’s story and will not consider himself to be a champion until he climbs the top step in Paris himself.

Noble sentiments but there are many fans who think he should have won in 2010 anyway, as Contador’s margin of victory was exactly the same amount of time that he took out of Schleck when the Luxembourger’s chain slipped off in the mountains, thus breaking one of cycling’s unwritten rules of fair play.

But Schleck’s voice was not the only one to back Contador on his judgement day.

Scarponi, the Italian who finished a distant second at the 2011 Giro, echoed Schleck’s reluctant acceptance speech, and cycling’s greatest champion, Eddy Merckx, went even further, saying he was “disgusted” with the decision.

Far less surprising, perhaps, is the almost universal support the 29-year-old has received at home.

After all, it was last January’s decision by the Spanish Cycling Federation, under huge political pressure, to exonerate the rider that prompted the UCI and Wada to demand a stiffer penalty.

There is some irony, however, in the words of support from Oscar Pereiro, who won the 2006 Tour de France when American cyclist Floyd Landis was stripped of his victory for also failing a drug test.

Justice was served much quicker that time, but cycling’s critics will say it did not do much good in terms of lessons learned, did it?

My view, if I am allowed to have one, is that cycling is a cleaner sport now than it has been for a very long time. Perhaps ever.

Cycling should also be congratulated for policing itself far more aggressively than most.

But there is no getting away from the fact that this is bad news for a sport that has only just started to recover from a particularly grim decade.

It will also fuel the conspiracy theorists who contrast Contador’s treatment with the recent announcement from the US federal government that it will not be pursuing its investigation into Lance Armstrong, Contador’s predecessor as cycling’s best rider.

For them, Contador does not sell enough bikes and is therefore expendable. Armstrong, on the other hand, is a one-man industry.

There is no answer to those claims, not one that will convince the anti-Armstrong lobby anyway. But that is cycling’s biggest problem.

It is far too vulnerable to these eternal debates and easy cynicism. And it will remain so for as long as its champions fail to adequately explain the unusual drugs testers find in their bodies.

The reason I ask is the same reason the venerable "You and Yours" programme was asking. With London 2012 now little more than 200 days away, do we, as a nation, have any chance of reaching our Olympic legacy targets for mass participation?

The short answer to those questions is "no, they're not and no, we don't".

The longer answer, however, is much more complicated and that is what made "What's Your Sport?" such an interesting listen.

Is a group activity, such as ballroom dancing, really a sport? Photo: BBC

Before I get into the meat of the debate I should explain what these targets are all about. Or, more precisely, were all about, as we don't hear about them so much these days.

The first was a general ambition to make the nation slightly less wedged to the sofa and was supposed to be "delivered" by the Department of Health. Doctors and nurses were mobilised to raise the heart rates of Brits of all shapes and sizes for about 30 minutes a week: prevention not cure.

Sadly, the most recent data suggests the early progress made from 2007 has run out of puff.

Fewer than 15 million people fit into this category and any hope of getting that significantly closer to 16 million by 2013 has vanished. Which is what has happened to this target as government policy: not formally dropped, just not talked about.

That is beginning to look like the fate of the other target too, the ambitious goal of getting one million more people to play a lot more sport.

This target - set by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) via Sport England, the agency in charge of "sport for all" - was always going to be trickier as it entails a serious commitment for most in terms of time and money, three sessions a week.

Like the first target, early momentum here is tailing off. What is more worrying is that the numbers for teenagers and women are falling.

There are now about seven million people who play enough sport to meet the criteria, way off the 7.8 million hoped for by this time next year.

Taken together, these two measures of participation add up to nearly 22 million people, aged 16 and older, playing weekly sport. That's 35% of the population.

Put that like, it does not sound so bad, does it? After all, "sport for all" is fine for those who like sport but terrifying for those with memories of frostbitten cross-country runs and the humiliation of being picked last.

But those numbers do not sound so good when you hear that half the population are not doing much exercise at all and nearly three million Brits have diabetes. That last number is up by almost 50% in four years and the vast majority suffer from Type 2 diabetes, which develops in the very overweight. On this trend, there will be 5.45 million cases by 2030.

And it's not just the health time bomb we should be worried about.

Sport, whether you liked it at school or not, can do things other social policy tools cannot. Keeping boys interested in their lessons, giving girls with body image worries some healthy role models, promoting good relations between community groups and giving the nation some feel-good entertainment - sport can help with all of these.

Which brings me back to those activities at the top. None of them would have been picked up by Sport England's researchers because they have used a fairly narrow definition of sport ever since former DCMS minister James Purnell told them in 2007 that the clue is in Sport England's title - no pastimes.

This put the national governing bodies of the respective sports in charge of mass participation. Sport England's role was reduced to dishing out money and collecting results. Those results have been very disappointing but for a handful of sports.

Sport does not have to be competitive, but it must be accessible, fun and inclusive. Photo: Reuters

I kept thinking about this as caller after caller told the "You and Yours" audience about the exercise they do every week that would not "count" as formal sport.

Diana from Norfolk talked about the netball she played for "giggles with the girls" until some of them got too serious and wanted to play actual matches.

Somebody else emailed in to say they swim three times a week but "can't stand sports", whilst a leisure centre owner in London said she had ripped the squash courts out to create more room for Zumba.

I am not listing these examples to mock them. I list them because they provide clues as to how we can improve our overall fitness and, in the long run, perhaps win more medals too.

Sport does not have to be competitive. It does not need pitch markings. It does not even need to be that organised. But it does need to be accessible, fun and inclusive. That means being more attractive to women, the young and the old, being affordable and easier to fit around busy lives.

Staging great sport in this country in the hope that people will be inspired to start doing it themselves is not a dreadful idea provided it is not the only idea. We also need to open up our best facilities - often in private ownership - for greater public use and we need to encourage more people to take up coaching without charging them an arm and a leg to get qualified.

But most of all we have to stop turning people off sport. If somebody wants to get fitter, what is wrong with ballroom dancing? That could get the competitive juices flowing again and lead to a more sporty activity next. Or the buzz of exercising again could tempt them to add some badminton to their weekly routine.

That is the funny thing about exercise: it can be difficult to encourage if you get bogged down in detail but can pop up in the strangest places if you create the right environment.

A good example of this is table tennis, one of the few "regular" sports doing well participation-wise.

It has made a virtue out of a vice in that inner-city schools with no outside space can put half a dozen tables in the dining hall and get a PE lesson going. Put those tables in shopping malls or train stations and you take your sport to the people. Get a coach there with a couple of bats and some balls and you may just spark an Olympic dream.

There is no magic bullet here and those legacy targets will be missed. But they were worth a shot and the same can be said of foxtrots and polkas and probably Zumba too, although you will never catch me trying it.

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And it is this most recent experience - his stint as Plymouth Argyle's administrator - that has caused Guilfoyle to have a Jerry Maguire moment.

Fellow devotees of the film will recall the "mission statement" the sports agent tapped out during a crisis of conscience: his agency needed to be more honest and personal, which could only be achieved with fewer clients. His colleagues said they loved it to his face, while they engineered his exit behind his back.

This week, Guilfoyle published a blog titled "Football clubs - are they businesses worth saving?" The product of a Plymouth "post-mortem", it finishes with a set of promises for how football insolvencies should go in future. It is coherent, sensible and completely unworkable, a point Guilfoyle acknowledged with a wistful chuckle when I pointed it out.

And it isn't just Guilfoyle who thinks this.

Having read the Leeds-based insolvency practitioner's appraisal of the landscape for failing clubs, I asked two other well-known "IPs" what they thought about the coming year or two. It was grim stuff.

Gerald Krasner, of AFC Bournemouth and Leeds United fame/infamy, was even more pessimistic than Guilfoyle, while Andrew "Pompey" Andronikou admitted it was now almost impossible to walk away having pleased everybody.

Plymouth Argyle were saved after the local council agreed to buy back their Home Park ground

Krasner's comments were particularly startling.

"The world has changed, the buyers just aren't there anymore," he said. "A lot of people want to own a club but they don't want to write a cheque.

"The market for British buyers has disappeared and that leaves only overseas bidders, which brings a different set of problems.

"Frankly, there is no economic argument for buying most of these clubs - it is political or emotional.

"I said a few years ago that 10 could disappear by 2020. I might have got that wrong but there are two or three on the brink right now and at least one would surprise you."

It was in March when Plymouth Argyle ran out of money and entered administration. Guilfoyle, fresh from successful rescues at Luton Town and Crystal Palace, was put in charge and the countdown to a fresh start began. That countdown finally finished at the end of October.

Mission accomplished: Guilfoyle had fulfilled his duties as an officer of the court, got the best possible deal for the creditors and avoided presiding over the death of a cherished community asset.

This, however, glosses over eight months that saw last rites administered at Home Park half-a-dozen times, staff go unpaid, the club's most valuable assets sold, a state-owned bank accept a huge loss and Argyle sink to the bottom of the Football League.

That period also saw serious damage to Guilfoyle's reputation as a clear-sighted operator in a murky world.

Why? The short answer is that, if Argyle was anything other than a football club, it would have been liquidated. Under these circumstances, any rescue is going to be fraught with compromises.

The slightly longer answer is that he backed the wrong horse, a fact he acknowledges in his blog.

Many fans told him at the time that selling the club to Truro City chairman Kevin Heaney was a bad idea and they were proved right.

The property developer's plans unravelled in catastrophic fashion but it is important to note he was the only one to emerge from the preliminary tyre-kicking phase with cash to keep the club afloat and pass the bank's time-waster test.

Guilfoyle misjudged his man, for once, but his choice was limited. The club's eventual saviour, local businessman James Brent, was still waiting in the wings as a buyer of last resort. So it was Heaney or nobody.

It's a dilemma Krasner knows well from his time at Bournemouth, where he once started a news conference by telling everybody he did not know what to say only to have a colleague wave a just-delivered cheque at him from the back of the room. Panic over, see you next month.

What upsets Guilfoyle, though, is how bad relations got with the fans. Having tried to keep supporters in the loop, his efforts to salvage the Heaney deal enraged large sections of the Home Park crowd, who used every means available to heap pressure on the administrator, his firm and the authorities.

Guilfoyle understands where this emotional response comes from - he told me more than once that he too is a football fan - but is dismayed at how poisonous the atmosphere became. It is for this reason he has written his own "The Things We Think and Do Not Say" memo.

In future, Guilfoyle says he will be more honest at the outset about the club's prospects of survival. He will also refuse to sign any confidentiality clauses and commit to keeping fans updated via websites created for the administration process.

But most importantly there will be a tight deadline of no more than a month for the rescue to happen and the money will have to arrive in full or the club will be shut down.

Just think about that for a moment and remember Krasner's warning of more administrations to come. Sobering, isn't it?

Andronikou, currently attempting to save Portsmouth for the second time in little over a year, said Guilfoyle's recipe for the future was a nice idea but impossible in practice.

"We would all like to go into these clubs, do a deal in a couple of weeks, get paid and get out but that will never happen," he said.

"Football clubs aren't factories. There are local and social implications and you have to bide your time. After all, if you do the deal too quickly you'll only be criticised for not marketing it properly.

"But there is no doubt there aren't as many of those 'mad people' football clubs have relied on, not in this country anyway. Sport is still a sexy investment but there is less money out there."

So, to paraphrase Maguire's mission statement, there is a cruel wind blowing through our business, it is time to think smaller, more personal and more manageable. Perhaps that goes for us fans too?

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But I will be very surprised if anybody can come up with something good enough to lighten the mood amongst Portsmouth fans - it is hard to stay cheerful when your most recent fit and proper persons include a banker arrested for asset-stripping, Dubai's self-styled Donald Trump (but without any money) and a chap who may not even exist.

Pompey fans can be forgiven for thinking "please Lord, spare us from fit and proper persons, send us some wrong 'uns".

Because let's face it, the infamous FAPPT may well have been rebranded but it is still self-evidently failing to do what it says on the tin, namely keep valuable community assets out of the hands of those who cannot be trusted to look after them.

I fear, however, that this will not wash with Pompey fans.

Portsmouth have suffered more problems as the club's owners slipped into administration on Tuesday

Antonov, a 36-year-old Russian banker, might have satisfied the Swedes but our Financial Services Authority (FSA) would not let him open a branch of his bank here and the European Investment Bank refused to lend Saab money because Antonov was involved.

Hardly ringing endorsements, you might have thought, but not enough to fall foul of the Football League's set of objective criteria. And that is the very heart of this matter.

When asked about this apparent missed sitter, a Football League spokesman said the new test is designed to be a "series of objective criteria that defines sensible standards to be met by people holding senior positions at football clubs".

"What it is not, is a subjective judgement about the suitability of individuals that could potentially leave the league open to legal challenge every time an individual is turned down," he continued.

"This would rapidly become a significant drain on club income and use up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds in legal fees."

So, quite simply, the authorities are faced with a dilemma.

They can put something relatively light-touch but legally sound in the rulebook, hoping it will be enough to deter most cowboys without frightening off genuine investors.

Or they can bring in a more robust test that would incorporate a golf club-style vetting process and hope the PR wins they get from keeping out the worst carpetbaggers will offset the costs they incur for blackballing determined billionaires.

There is a third option: they can give up entirely, which is what the Scottish Premier League has done.

"Any test that attempts to assess the suitability of prospective directors by reference to objective criteria is inherently a very difficult thing to formulate and apply," SPL chief executive Neil Doncaster told me when I asked him why his league has no fit and proper hoop to jump through.

"Despite the existence of such tests elsewhere in the UK - and the Scottish Football Association's articles of association - insolvency events in football have continued to occur.

"Relying on a fit and proper person test to ensure clubs are run in a manner that would avoid insolvency has no track record of success in Scotland or elsewhere in the UK."

Well, quite.

Doncaster's point that FAPPTs are a bit, well, pointless, was picked up Damian Collins MP, a prominent member of the House of Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee that recently issued a fairly critical report on football's governance.

For Collins, the real problem is that all the tests tried so far have focused on the "point of transaction" and not the onward management of the club. That is why he would like to see a more stringent licensing system introduced to ensure that owners have the means they say they have.

Anything else results in the rules being made to look "ridiculous" when another fit and proper but potless proprietor comes along and takes a club into administration.

Collins also noted just how hard it can be for the football authorities to do the kind of forensic due diligence the FSA can (and must) conduct before dishing out bank licences. The Football League is pretty honest in this regard, it cannot afford to do this kind of work and the Premier League has only recently started to try.

Both leagues, moreover, say they are moving towards a form of licensing, in that all clubs are asked to provide annual financial plans, all bills to players, the taxman and each other must be settled on time, and there is a big push towards encouraging sustainable spending.

Doncaster, a former lawyer who spent eight years in charge at Norwich City, said this was a far more fruitful area for regulators to explore than attempting to create a fail-safe but fair vetting process for would-be owners.

I also have found some support for the Football League's argument that measuring the success of its ownership test is difficult when most of us will only ever hear about the failures.

Mark Fry, the insolvency expert who helped Portsmouth's rivals Southampton out of the critical ward two years ago and oversaw the sale of Hull City last year, said the new rules have made a difference.

OK, that is not going to help the shell-shocked faithful at Fratton Park but Fry did say something that might cheer them slightly.

He said Pompey would have a good case in arguing they should not be hit with a points deduction just yet, providing they can prove they gain no "material advantage" from their parent company's insolvency protection.

The Football League ended up sending the accountants in to Southampton to work out if the club dragged the holding company under or vice-versa and may have to do the same at Portsmouth.

But Fry believes the authorities acted too hastily then and the accountants misread the situation - taking the holding company into administration was part of a plan to sell the club, not ditch debt. He thinks the League will be more circumspect this time, particularly given the complexities of Antonov's various businesses.

So, a crumb of comfort for Pompey fans but hardly an answer as to how this happened to them again. Perhaps the only solution to this is that they club together and have a crack at running the club themselves. They could not do any worse.

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Forthright, honest and impassioned, it was exactly what you would expect from a man with a significant emotional and financial stake in the North London club.

"I've been coming for 30 years and that was probably the worst AGM I've ever attended. The club often talks about respect but there was a complete lack of respect shown today. It was awful."

That Stan was Stanley Salter, a long-term shareholder and Highbury veteran.

"I've been asked to say a few things," the 64-year-old American said coyly. "I'm not sure why but people seem to be interested."

What followed were about two minutes of polite small-talk - believe me, I had a lot of offers but this was the only club for me; Arsene Wenger and the board make great decisions; my family loves London, you better get used to us - but absolutely nothing an Arsenal fan could pin his or her hopes on for brighter days around the corner.

Stan Kroenke is a regular at his NBA team, the Denver Nuggets, but is rarely seen, or heard, at Arsenal PHOTO: Getty

It was, in Salter's words, a disrespectfully vague statement from a man who had made only one previous visit to the club in the six months since he more than doubled his holding in Arsenal to become the de facto owner. The fact that he had only just arrived from Denver, leaving no leeway for delays, was also noted.

"Of course, we are interested in what you have to say," was the general response from the audience. "But is that it?"

But by saying so little, mostly Silent Stan at least avoided antagonising anybody. If only club chairman Peter Hill-Wood had been so wise.

The 75-year-old businessman has been chairman for nearly 30 years. His father did it before him and his grandfather before that. The Hill-Woods and Arsenal share a long and proud history - and that is exactly where many at the meeting would like to leave it.

For the first time in anybody's memory, all questions from the floor had to be pre-submitted and there was no chance to ask follow-ups.

But there is a problem with doing things this way, the questions tend to be quite good: far better, it has to be said, than the scripted answers Hill-Wood read out in very unconvincing tones.

When are we going to start winning things again? Why won't you issue more shares to raise funds? How can you raise prices by 6.5% and then not adequately replace world-class players who leave? We lost 8-2 to Manchester United and Spurs have a better team, what's going on?!?

Twelve times Hill-Wood was asked to explain and/or justify club policy and 12 times he left the crowd wanting more. More energy, more hope, more passion.

The meeting's biggest round of applause came when one shareholder told Hill-Wood he was "so out-of-touch" that he must go, with former vice-chairman David Dein coming back to replace him. Ouch, even Sepp Blatter gets an easier ride than that.

Kroenke, to be fair, did get out of his seat at that point to defend his chairman, saying "we're fans too" and "we're going to a certain place, we are with you".

Nope, I'm not sure what that means either.

As so often with Arsenal, it was left to Kroenke's most important employee to pick up the standard, speak from the heart and rally the troops.

Arsene Wenger's star has dimmed somewhat in recent seasons but there is no denying his ability to speak to the wide-eyed optimist that resides in every football fan.

"I see fear and discontent amongst you and I understand it," started the infamously short-sighted manager, "but we fight against clubs with high resources".

He then detailed last season's disappointments - "the most difficult to accept" in his 15 years at the club - and admitted he sometimes blames himself for thinking his eternally young squad could win it all.

Having conceded some ground, the Frenchman then reclaimed it.

The club played 27 games in three months over the winter and it was those efforts that derailed us at the end, he explained.

Cesc Fabregas and Robin Van Persie played only 24 league games between them, we were unlucky with injuries.

Remember how close we were to beating Barca, our best ever performance.

"People always used to say I needed to buy a goalkeeper but look at us now, we have great goalkeepers," he continued.

Then we got to the heart of his message: Arsene still knows, trust me, stay united, we can finish fourth.

So that is the level of the club's aspirations: fourth, the league's third-best loser.

Arsenal's defeat by Birmingham in the Carling Cup final was the start of a dire run for the club PHOTO: Getty

A 15th straight season of Champions League football (a record only Manchester United and Real Madrid would be able to match) is very impressive.

But is it enough for a team that went unbeaten through an entire season only seven years ago, has the highest ticket prices in Europe and a beautiful new ground in one of the wealthiest cities in the world?

As goals go, it is certainly better than the one suggested earlier in the meeting by club chief executive Ivan Gazidis of reaching 10m followers on Facebook this season.

One wonders if that will be one of the key performance indicators Gazidis will be measured on next year, as he met all his targets this year, hence his £1.7m pay packet, which makes him the second best-paid CEO in the league.

It is often easy to overdo the gloom on occasions like these and there are clearly clubs in crisis and clubs who need to keep things in perspective (this observer couldn't help looking around Arsenal's well appointed home and thinking they have problems most clubs would love to have) but things aren't right at the Emirates.

There is, however, a potential solution. His name is Alisher Usmanov. He owns almost 30% of the club, actually goes to Arsenal games and is one of the richest men in the world. He even owns a slice of Facebook, which should delight Gazidis.

Sadly, he is about as welcome at the Emirates as Spurs mascot Chirpy.

Might that change? Not with this board. They make the Soviet Union's last Politburo look like a student union entertainments committee. But then, the Politburo did not see the end coming either.

In the meantime, the club is doomed to go forth in pursuit of fourth.

As well as my blogs, you can follow me when I'm out and about at http://twitter.com/mattslaterbbc

So how will today's heroes of the labour movement be viewed by coming generations? For what will they be grateful?

Well, if they happen to play basketball it could be for the right to buy more beachfront property because the megastars of the National Basketball Association are in a militant mood.

LA Laker & union boss Derek Fisher sets out the players' position in their NBA labour dispute. PHOTO: Getty 

"Share half the sport's revenues with the bosses and agree to a limit on our earning power? Never. Down sweatbands, lads, we're all out."

The recent announcement that the first two weeks of the NBA season, due to start next month, have been cancelled, probably did not come as a shock to anybody who has been following this tale closely.

It is a dispute that has been a long time coming and its twists and turns this summer have been forensically analysed in the US.

But for the majority of sports fans outside America, news that people who earn an average annual wage of £3.26m are starting to sound like Arthur Scargill will come as a huge surprise.

In the interests of sanity I will gloss over the full details of the Great Basketball Strike of 2011 and simply direct the more inquisitive amongst you to the chapter-and-verse coverage stateside.

But there are a number of more salient points I should flag up.

The first is that this is not really a players' strike; it's an owners' strike. Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James have not walked out of their places of work, they have been locked out.

This is because the most recent deal between the owners and players, a six-year agreement signed in 2005, expired at the end of June.

That deal covered everything from the NBA's salary cap arrangements, to the creation of a second-tier competition, to a ban on under-19s.

But most importantly it established a 57/43 revenue split in favour of the players.

So, last season, nearly £1.4bn of the league's total turnover of £2.4bn went into their bank accounts, which probably explains why NBA teams filled spots five through 11 in a 2010 pay survey of the world's richest sports leagues.

Among British teams, only Chelsea had a higher wage bill, although Manchester City are climbing that chart fast now.

But here is the second key point about the NBA dispute: the owners are willing to write off an entire season (refund tickets, reimburse sponsors, renegotiate TV contracts and so on) in order to achieve a more equitable distribution and wipe out the £1bn losses they claim the last deal brought them.

Compare that to the 68/32 revenue split Premier League bosses seem willing to put up with (it is a financial model-busting 88/12 in the Championship) and you will start to understand a fundamental difference between US and British professional sport.

In America, both sides are supposed to make money, not just the players.

That 22 of the NBA's 30 teams were in the red last season is unacceptable to your typical US sports entrepreneur.

They might run their sports like Soviet commissars (closed shops, central planning, the collective being stronger than the individual) but they are rampant capitalists underneath. Show me the money and all that.

The contrast with the British professional sports model - so let's face it, we are talking about football - could not be starker.

Here our owners behave like free-market zealots, railing against the very hint of regulation, and then wonder why they must make do with 1970s-style profits.

The NBA's battle lines look pretty entrenched at the moment and it is starting to look like this lockout could rival the six-month dispute of 1998.

But this is hardly new or unusual. The risk of strike action, from one side or the other, is an occupational hazard for the American sports fan.

The NFL season was almost delayed by a similar dispute, baseball's had more strikes than British Leyland and ice hockey lost an entire season in 2005.

So maybe their way isn't so great, after all.

And there is a potential upside for the British (American) sports fan to all this labour unrest: locked-out players need somewhere to play.

It has emerged this week that a dozen of the NBA's biggest stars are planning a two-week tour that will take in four continents and feature six games.

London, lucky old us, is set to get two.

So let's bring out the banners from the days gone by and enjoy some flying picket basketball action.

As well as my blogs, you can follow me when I'm out and about at http://twitter.com/mattslaterbbc

Ex-tennis star Yannick Noah and Tour great Bernard Hinault with the new yellow jersey. PHOTO: Getty

Since then? Zut Alors. Cyclists from seven nations have climbed the podium’s top step on the Champs-Elysees but no French hero has even got close since 1989.

That Laurent Fignon got so very close - he lost by eight seconds - only makes it worse.

This 26-year wait is a blink of the eye compared to British tennis followers’ wait for a male champion at Wimbledon or the years of hurt experienced by English football fans, but it is no less nagging. And one of the many videos in an unbelievably grand presentation in Paris highlighted just how annoying this inability to win their own race is becoming.

The premise was a chance encounter between Hinault and tennis star Yannick Noah (the last Frenchman to win at Roland Garros…in 1983) on a quiet ride through the countryside.

Ah, salut Yannick, oui Bernard, ca va, tres bien etc etc went the small talk, before a surprisingly chipper Hinault (his nickname is “The Badger” because of his snarling aggression when cornered) brought up the good old days.

“What, when France used to win?” answered Noah. “Une belle epoque,” they both agreed, as did most of the 3,000 people packed into the Palais de Congres’ main auditorium, a number which is staggering in itself, especially when you remember the 2012 route had already been inadvertently revealed on the official website last week.

Sure, the obvious parallel here is Wimbledon and Britain's increasingly shrill desire to scratch that itch. But I think the French longing for a Tour win goes deeper.

Le Tour is France in a way that Wimbledon can never really represent Britain. A certain slice of England, perhaps, but everything about the Tour screams France.

OK, it likes to dip in and out of its neighbours from time to time - twice this year, the start in Belgium and a short detour through Switzerland - but this is always on the Tour’s terms.

There have been 12 wins by native Anglophones since 1985 but there were no concessions to the language of Shakespeare on Tuesday: not that any of the growing band of Aussies, Brits, Yanks et al would complain, they know where it would get them.

In fact, the most recent of that dozen, Cadel Evans, delivered a speech that would have made my French GCSE teacher weep tears of joy.

Of course, the Tour has a huge advantage over Wimbledon in the country-in-a-microcosm stakes as it does, by its very nature, involve the whole nation.

There is also a shifting narrative to the carefully chosen route. Villages, towns and even cities vie for the chance to be included.

Being photogenic helps but the Tour wants more: what’s your story, do you have a link to the sport, do you really, really want it?

A large proportion of the audience at the launch were there to represent places blessed with a start or finish, towns like Abbeville in Picardy, Peyragudes in the Hautes-Pyrenees or any of the other seven locales getting a slice of the action for the first time.

For them, the peloton’s visit is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tell their tale and sell their wares.

That last point is crucial because the Tour is unashamedly commercial. A quick flick through the list of “partenaires officiels” shows this is more than a sporting contest, it is France’s trade fair.

To give just one example, the real point of the Hinault-Noah epic was to draw attention to the Tour’s new kit deal with that most French of brands, Le Coq Sportif.

So perhaps a better choice for a British comparison would be the Tour versus our entire summer season - Lord’s, Wimbers, Silverstone, the Open and so on - but even this doesn’t quite work for me. France’s love for “Le Grand Boucle” crosses barriers of age, class and geography.

And yet it is changing, gradually but irresistibly. No matter how hard they try to pretend it isn’t.

Cycling has broken out of its traditional market in France, Benelux, Italy and Spain. Ever since Greg Lemond got the better of “The Badger” in 1986, America has cared, as have us Brits.

What used to be a motley band of English-speaking adventurers is now a sizeable segment of the pro circuit’s population.

Throw in the Scandinavians and multilingual Germans and eastern Europeans, and you have a very noisy minority.

This is reflected in the Tour’s expanding global profile. Pictures from the final stage in Paris are seen in 190 countries around the world, and 70 of those broadcast the entire race live.

Crews from at least half of those countries were in the Palais de Congres.

There is a flipside to this popularity, though, and that is an inevitable dilution of the very Frenchness that sets this remarkable event apart.

You can sense it every time an excitable commentator roars “Cavendish!” when our very own world champion crosses the line again, arms outstretched.

The tagline for next year’s race is “Tous Fous du Tour”, which (I think) loosely translates as everybody’s crazy for the Tour.

That craziness is definitely catching, I just hope it never kills the patient.

As well as my blogs, you can follow me when I'm out and about at http://twitter.com/mattslaterbbc

For those surprised to hear football has a moral high ground, don't worry, it's all relative.

You may also be confused by my reference to the G-14. Wasn't that rich clubs' club disbanded three years ago when Uefa roundly defeated it/temporarily bought it off (it's a matter of some debate)?

Erm... yes. And no.

Based in Nyon, the organisation has just staged its seventh general assembly. The venue for the two-day gathering was Geneva, just 20 miles down the shoreline, but there was nothing neutral about the conversation: clubs are the most important voice in football, not federations, and there is far too much international football played with players we provide practically free of charge.

The ECA's new "common position on good governance" sounds a lot like the kind of thing the G-14 talked about, which in itself is no surprise as it is the same people doing most of the talking.

Barca and Real, Liverpool and United, AC and Inter, Juve and Bayern... these were the biggest gorillas in the jungle in 2000 and - give or take a Chelsea or City - they remain that way.

So when it comes time to hear what the ECA thinks about international fixtures, football finance, youth development and so on, it is Barca and Real, Liverpool and United, AC and...you get the idea.

But it wasn't supposed to be this way.

The formation of the ECA was meant to be a defeat for the G-14, which by this time had grown to become an 18-strong lobby group representing teams from seven leagues.

Their concerns were primarily a lack of compensation from the federations for using their players, the absence of insurance against injury on international duty, too many friendlies (stop me if you have heard this before) and not enough say in the game's running.

To get their way the G-14 clubs took legal action and issued veiled threats about taking their ball home and setting up an NFL-style league of their own.

New Uefa president Michel Platini was having none of this, or so he said, and called on the "elitist" G-14 to disband.

But six months later, Fifa and Uefa had agreed to share more of their tournament revenues with the clubs and push the federations to insure the players properly.

Platini even watered down his attempt to democratise access to the Champions League cash machine, which was already the ultimate example of the compromises Uefa has been forced to make with the most powerful clubs.

The quid pro quo was that the G-14 would drop its lawsuits and open itself up to clubs from all 53 nations represented by Uefa. With all those rivals under one umbrella, this looked like a classic divide-and-rule strategy.

So why, three years later, are the clubs back stronger than ever?

The answer was pretty clear at the Hotel President Wilson this week. There are 20 or so clubs (you can probably guess them) who make all the running at the ECA, chair the working groups, sit on the board and communicate the message. Most of the rest look happy just to be invited.

The G-14's power has not been diluted, it now comes with the added punch of the also-rans and aspiring upstarts from two dozen wealthy leagues. And frankly, if they cannot gain a few concessions from a very compromised Fifa they might as go off in a huff and play amongst themselves.

This sounds grim for fans of the international friendly. Derided by clubs and increasingly dismissed by large sections of the media, they are central to the business plans of federations across the globe, including our own Football Association, not to mention integral to preparing teams for tournaments.

But do you need so many of them? And do they have to be scattered throughout the year? Come to think of it, do you need full-time international managers?

Argentina have 21 games this year, including 14 friendlies. Brazil have 15 games, 11 friendlies. Germany play 13 times, Italy 12. England are practically part-timers with a probable nine games this year and one of those was called off.

ECA chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who also happens to be chief executive of Bayern Munich, dismisses many of these games as "nonsense" designed only to raise money. His counterpart at Manchester United and fellow ECA board member David Gill agrees. He must get the teas in when this subject comes up at the FA board meetings he also attends.

It is a similar story when we talk about the division of TV and sponsorship money from the World Cup and European Championships, which are hugely lucrative to Fifa and Uefa respectively.

The clubs saw about 1% of the cash that flowed from South Africa 2010, they won't put up with that again. And Uefa's desire to expand the 2016 European Championships in France to 24 teams - and sell the TV rights centrally - will almost certainly result in a bigger TV slice going to the clubs.

So the G-14 clubs are on the march again and the threat of breakaway organisations and ending international competition is the weapon of mass destruction that nobody wants to talk about in public.

Blatter and Platini will have to make concessions but all is not lost for the international game. The ECA's members are in agreement now but that is only because they have not really started to get their heads around the status quo-preserving implications of Uefa's new financial fair play rules. G-14 v the rest could save the friendly.

As well as my blogs, you can follow me when I'm out and about at http://twitter.com/bbc_matt