Manchester United can relax. Not only have they kept that pouting moppet Cristiano Ronaldo with them for the forthcoming season, having threatened to break both of his legs with a sledgehammer, but they are already one trophy ahead of Chelsea before the season even properly starts. United won the prestigious and historic Tinapa Business Resorts “Soccer” Tournament with a narrow victory over Portsmouth a week or so back. The final was held in the Nigerian capital city of Abuja and was pronounced a great success by none other than Garth Crooks, so who are we to argue.

It is true that the 60,000-seat stadium was only half-full and that of those inside only a small minority paid for their extortionately priced tickets, the rest having rioted outside and then forced their way in. Tickets were priced at more than £200, which is roughly equivalent to the GDPs of neighbouring Benin and Chad combined. It would take your average Nigerian several decades of writing fraudulent e-mails to Westerners claiming that they have inherited some money to earn that sort of sum.

The locals were not simply indifferent to the game, they were actually angry. There was flares, fighting and chaos — but as a PR exercise for Tinapa Business Resorts, I’m sure it was a complete triumph. Impressed by their ability to stage a football match, I shall certainly be staying in the Tinapa resort should the baleful gods of fate ever send me to Nigeria.

I just hope that Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore was watching the final: the best team in England playing the FA Cup winners in a football-mad country and only 10,000 people buy tickets. How’s that plan for extra games in foreign parts coming along, Rich? I wonder how many would have turned up for Hull City versus Stoke City. Eight?

The administrators of the game have become besotted with their brand, deluded into thinking that foreigners believe our Premier League teams are as attractive and compelling as they think themselves to be. And so another season is poised to start and we scrabble for interest wherever we can, knowing that the top four will be the same top four as last year and that the bottom three will most likely be the three that came up or, at best, two of the three that came up.

As a neutral, you cling to small things; can West Bromwich Albion maybe survive, somehow, perhaps at the expense of Fulham? Can Tottenham or Aston Villa sustain a challenge for a Champions League place at least until February? Is it possible that Newcastle United might actually go down, given that they are chasing David Healy, the recourse of a club in crisis with death flapping its big black wings over its head? Still, they seem to have offloaded the extraordinarily over-rated Alan Smith at last (primarily a striker: 37 games; no goals), so maybe there is hope for the Geordies.

They begin the season, though, as they begin every season, mired in misery and conflict — one way or another there will be fun to be had from watching Kevin and Dennis sort it all out.

There is predictability elsewhere, too — a predictability enforced by the game’s authorities. In Coca Cola League Two, for example, the battle to stay out of the conference will surely be contested between Bournemouth (17 points deducted), Rotherham (17 points deducted) and Luton Town (30 points deducted). Luton will need approaching 80 points to survive, therefore, and Rotherham and Bournemouth somewhere in the mid to late sixties. The task is surely beyond Luton and probably beyond Rotherham, given the state of their squad. The fact that two desperately poor teams have been similarly donkey-punched by the Football League is about the only good luck Bournemouth have had for a season or two; they fought bravely to stay up last season, despite a swingeing penalty from the Football League for drifting into administration.

The mindset of league chairman Brian Mawhinney et al seems to be that we have too many clubs, clubs whose fanbase is stretched too thinly, whose resources are inadequate, and that the solution is to edge them decisively towards termination. This was great fun when it was Leeds United on the receiving end; less so when it is clubs which haven’t, through epic delusions of grandeur, terribly over-reached themselves in terms of expenditure, merely flapped their arms about frantically to save themselves from drowning. Last season a good half a dozen clubs hovered before administration and the consequent annihilation of their points tally; this season you might expect it to be rather more than that and with a greater proportion succumbing.

The rest of the clubs, the financially astute, will staff their sides with a succession of loanees whom they will be almost always unable to purchase outright. If the average lifespan of a Premier League player at one club is falling to around the one-season mark, then the average lifespan below the likes of Hull City must be measurable in terms of mere months. You turn up, pay your £25 and watch players who are often entirely unfamiliar to you and who will not be there, perhaps, the following week.

Still, there is plenty of life below the Premier League; there were fabulously exciting ends to the season at both ends in the Championship and Division One last season; still the prospect of genuine competitiveness and, to coin an oxymoron, the probability of the unexpected. Despite the divisive and unfair “parachute payments” to clubs relegated from the top division, some impoverished team in the Championship will battle its way forward to the playoffs in the manner of Hull or Stoke. At least one of last season’s relegated teams will fail (and my money’s on Derby County).

Money is undoubtedly queering the pitch in the lower leagues, but not so much that every intimation of pleasure has been dredged from the games. You go along to each game not entirely certain that your team is going to lose, or win — which is sort of the point. Enjoy the season, and good luck to whichever franchise you support.