It started with the lone voice of a friend who can no longer bring himself to spend 30-odd quid watching Aston Villa. By the time poor Emmanuel Eboué was getting it in the neck at Arsenal on Saturday, it had turned into a din.

We are talking about the complaints, the jeers, the boos and all the other sounds of intolerance that are ringing out around our football grounds; and not just at strugglers such as Blackburn Rovers, but at the most successful clubs.

We heard it at Arsenal only days after they had beaten Chelsea. And at Liverpool on the very night they went top of the Barclays Premier League. On Sunday, jeers rang out at Everton when David Moyes made a substitution. These are not clubs who are drifting along without hope or purpose, or where the managers, to use footballing parlance, don't know what they're doing. Nor can they be easily dismissed as specific complaints - against Eboué's wretched performance, or Liverpool's failure to breach West Ham United's defence, or Victor Anichebe's replacement by Leighton Baines - when they are becoming ever more shrill.

It has been a football fan's right, and indeed pleasure, to moan about his team since time began. The love/hate relationship was brilliantly caricatured by Michael Palin in his Ripping Yarns series.

His creation, Gordon Ottershaw, would come home and wreck the furniture, hurling the carriage clock through a living-room window, in anger at Barnstoneworth losing “eight bloody one - and four of them were back-passes”. But Ottershaw was taking out the worst of his frustration at home, not venting it at his own team.

Today's rage is different; instantaneous, often personalised and carrying a sense of entitlement - “I've paid my money, now where's the show?” And the money, the price on the ticket, is surely the issue here.

The financial demands on supporters were being discussed as greedy and unsustainable even before the credit crunch. Mix in job losses, plunging house prices and bleak forecasts and the finances of football, with £100,000-a-week salaries sustained by hundreds of millions of pounds worth of debt, appear horribly out of touch. Obscene, even.

Fans are paying £30-plus per ticket and, as with everything in life in the downturn, they need to feel that it is money well spent. Sadly, sport is unable to give those sorts of guarantees - and nor is it offering 30 per cent off, like most shops on the high street.

If this is just grumbling for now, it is worth asking how long before it becomes the ultimate protest by the fan and he does not turn up at all? The clubs can continue to point to healthy attendance figures, but, increasingly, the majority are being forced to think on their feet when it comes to cup games and unpopular midweek fixtures.

To throw in purely anecdotal evidence of my own, ticket requests that used to come every week are now down to every couple of months. And increasingly the conversation goes something like this: “I can get you two for Chelsea but it'll be £90”. “Thanks, but on second thoughts I'll watch it on the telly.”

These are floating fans and many clubs in the Premier League retain a strong base of season ticket-holders, but complacency is unadvisable given that waiting lists are shrinking.

There is no sign of impending calamity because broadcast revenues are expected to hold up well when they are renegotiated before the 2010-11 season. Even if the domestic market does not continue to grow, there should be increased value from overseas rights. Yet this security blanket may also be part of the problem. Will clubs really question their ticketing policies if broadcasting remains such a lucrative and reliable income stream?

There have been a few concessions, such as both Merseyside clubs cutting £1 off tickets after the cut in VAT to 15 per cent, but nothing that properly confronts the issue of value for money that is being asked by more and more supporters - and which is finding its outlet in a mistake by Eboué, a substitution by Moyes and even on the night when Liverpool go top.

To reduce prices may do little or nothing to make supporters more tolerant - “I paid my money, I'll shout what I like,” is the modern mantra - but it seems naive not to link the high cost of watching football with mounting impatience in the stands.

Everyone can hear the jeers. The challenge for the clubs is to demonstrate that they are listening.

Cristiano Ronaldo struggles with foreign affairs
Already European Footballer of the Year, Cristiano Ronaldo is expected to become the first Barclays Premier League star to get his hands on the trophy for Fifa's global award this month. And yet when asked to rank him among the best overseas signings, the Manchester United forward struggled to break into the top five when a few of us started making lists.

Crucially, the judgment went beyond skills and trophies and came down to those players who loved to be here as much as we loved to have them, and Dennis Bergkamp, Gianfranco Zola, Eric Cantona, Peter Schmeichel and Thierry Henry all made us feel like this was the only stage to play on, that English football was the best in the world.

In Ronaldo we have a footballer who sees better things beyond the Premier League, in Spain with Real Madrid most probably. That is his entitlement, but it is a slap in the face for us, his hosts. We keep telling ourselves that this is the best league in the world, but Ronaldo's itchy feet will force us to wonder if, truly, it is.

Manchester City eyeing the January sales
With even Chelsea making redundancies in these tough financial times, we are left to rely on Manchester City to provide the excitement in the January transfer window. Roque Santa Cruz from Blackburn Rovers, David Villa from Valencia, Kaká from AC Milan ... intriguingly, Michael Owen has also come up on City's radar, with the England forward out of contract at Newcastle United at the end of the season and therefore cheap. Owen is unaware of the interest, but that is what makes City so fascinating, and so troubling. There is only one manager, Mark Hughes, but there is more than one shopping list.