COLCHESTER United supporters going to the match of Saturday have good reason to feel a little cheated.

It was revealed this week that the club, sitting at the foot of Division Two, had the lowest turnover in England for the 1997-98 season.

The U's brought in just over £700,000, compared to the £88 million amassed by the Screw You's of Old Trafford.

That meagre sum was, by and large, collected from the meagre number of punters at Layer Road paying a relatively substantial sum to watch meagre football.

A substantial proportion of that income is swallowed up by the wages of the Colchester players, minuscule in comparison to the fortunes earned by mediocre Premiership 'stars'.

All players, great or small, are members of the Professional Footballers' Association and pay their annual dues, presumably at vastly differing rates.

The PFA is a seriously wealthy organisation and, in the light of yesterday's events, has money to burn.

For chief executive Gordon Taylor splashed out £1.9 million - yes, more than two and a half times the turnover of Colchester United - on a LS Lowry painting called Going To The Match.

It depicts crowds on their way to a windswept Burnden Park in 1953 and will be displayed in Salford.

It's not even a good likeness of the ground - there isn't a supermarket in sight.

And football fans couldn't have been as thin as matchsticks if they regularly ate the growlers and tripe on sale inside the ground. Taylor explained that, not only was the painting part of the game's cultural heritage, the investment might prove as profitable as keeping the £1.9 million in a bank account.

But whether the PFA obtained value for money - the reserve value was £500,000 - is not really the issue.

What is of concern is that the union has nearly £2 million to spend on such projects while clubs like Colchester fight a daily battle against liquidation.

Wouldn't these sums of money, amassed indirectly at the expense of the football supporter, not be better invested in bridging the alarming and growing gap between the games fat cats and backstreet boys by investing in the infrastructure of the game?

If something is not done to redress this obscene imbalance, then the PFA might just find that a number of their members are suddenly out of work when the Colchester Uniteds of this world go to the wall.

And then we enter the vicious circle of an inability to produce homegrown talent, leading to more expensive imports demanding huge wages (and paying huge subscriptions to the PFA), higher admission prices and the inevitable bursting of football's transient bubble of popularity.

Neil Bramwell is the Sports Editor

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