Football In The Prison Yard

The local football club is in financial straits. It is just a small town non league team that has been punching above its weight for a few years, but in the last year or two it has begun to fall apart.
These days the footballers are full-time, and the entrance money is enough to make you think twice about going.
Apparently, the cost of the turnstile operators and the stewards alone cost £36,000 a year, and next season these operatives will be asked to work for free.
Forty years ago, when the club had the best non league team in the country, at one end there was a grass bank, there was only one small stand for seated spectators and you could lean upon the barrier that bordered the pitch.
Nowadays, you cannot stand next to the barrier. Regulations forbid it. The space between playing area crowd is patrolled by stewards who keep guard in case of crowd trouble and pitch invasions, and homophobic and racist language.
(Indeed, a couple of years ago I was at a match at Leeds, when a spectator harangued a player for being so useless. The man used no offensive language, and the player, a defender, was largely responsible for the fact that his team had let in 6 goals, fully deserved the criticism. Yet the stewards saw fit to warn the angry spectator).
At one end of our little ground there is a camera on a pole, not to record the action on the pitch, but to record the actions of the crowd.
It used to be fun, long ago, going to watch the footie. Pay a small amount on the gate, watch a game on a field, shout and yell and get the working week out of your system. But now the game is played in the prison exercise yard.
Anything you do is regulated. Everything you do is regulated. Why pay good money to be shepherded, regulated, spied upon?
The football club is going bust because football is dead. Only by constant electro shocks of hype does the corpse keep twitching.
In the same way, the entire country is going bust, because society too has been put to death.