The Football League and the FA Premier League are now forbidding any unofficial site from publishing fixtures, on the grounds that the fixture list is their "intellectual property".

I contacted the Football League and their spokesman gave the following reasons for trying to stop the unofficial sites from providing a list that can be published anywhere, by anyone, except by unofficial web sites:

"The fixtures list takes considerable time, skill and effort to produce. Thus the League has the right to licence the list for a fee to any party it chooses to do business with."

Fair enough. If they want to give the impression that the fixtures list is some kind of huge effort on their part, (instead of what it is - a computer program) then I've got no problem with that. So why don't I pay for a licence, then ? Read on:

"It is the policy of the League not to licence fixtures to websites in direct competition with those of its member clubs. Our member clubs themselves would simply not want us to provide content to websites they, in effect, compete with."

And there was me thinking that I was SUPPORTING Chelsea, not competing with them. That's the problem, you see: these grey little men only think in terms of maximising revenue. They see the unofficial sites as competition to the clubs they're supporting. They haven't got the first clue about what motivates the people who pay their wages, i.e. football fans, which is why football is going in the sad direction that it is. It's a game, after all. Pele called it "The Beautiful Game", but it's anything but, now that it's been hijacked by commercial interests, or greed, to give it its proper name.

I get hundreds of fans visiting this site, from all over the world, all wanting info on the club they love. They're free to go to the official site, and they do, but they also like the alternative, fan's viewpoint that I provide. This doesn't make them go away and start supporting Arsenal, nor does it stop them from buying Chelsea merchandise. In fact you could argue that having my site around reinforces their loyalty to Chelsea. It's hard, therefore, to see how I can be said to be competing with the club. I do this because I love Chelsea, not because I want to make money out of them. It'd be nice if we could say the same thing for the Football/Premier Leagues. Enough said ?