Fitba' mad

With the new football season about to start we should remind ourselves tht the Barclay’s English Premier League is a league of haves and have-nots. At the top there are a handful of globally branded teams (Chelsea, Manchester United, etc.) that make and spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Between those teams and everyone else is an enormous financial gap.

In 2011-12, the six highest-spending teams paid their players $1.3 billion in wages, and the other 14 teams in the league combined paid their players $1.1 billion in wages.

Arsenal plays in a gleaming new $500 million stadium while Fulham plays right down the road in a 100-year-old arena that only has 27,000 seats.

It is now cliched to point out that football is now all about sponsorship, branding and commercialisation.

The season now kicks off with a media fashion show of all the new home and away football strips and how prominently the sponsors logos are placed.