It's been a sad old week for finance in football, with Portsmouth, Notts County and Chester all making headlines. Even Manchester United chief executive David Gill has apparently been involved in a confrontation with fans over the club's debt. Portsmouth, more significantly, are battling to fight a winding-up order and could very well go out of business if a new owner isn't found in the imminent future.

For Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror , it is now time for Portsmouth, Liverpool and Manchester United fans to take a stand.

The next time this column appears there may only be 19 teams left in the Premier League.

If it happens it will lead to grief in Portsmouth and shock among the wider football fraternity. Meanwhile, from a head-shaking distance, outsiders will demand to know how patrons of a multi-billion pound industry which was blatantly living beyond its means, could not see it coming.

The wider world has become sick of football pleading to be viewed as a special case because clubs are supposedly at the heart of our communities. So was Woolworths.

None of the other companies who sat alongside Portsmouth's lawyers in the High Court on Wednesday, facing winding-up orders, believed themselves to be above the taxation system. But Portsmouth, like every other football club which has hit the skids, did.

And in the past the heart-tugging has worked. Which is why the Inland Revenue has lost £30million from clubs going into administration and failing to pay their taxes. But now the taxman has had enough. He's skint too. And he wants his cash.

So that's why football is no longer a special case, and playing the "vital to the well-being of a community" card has become redundant. Once football's rulers allowed any shyster to take over clubs and "leverage" the loyalty of their fans to make a quick buck, the game lost all credibility.

I'm reaching the conclusion that if fans want special treatment they have to show why they're special. If they want their club back they're going to have to grab it themselves.

Take Liverpool and Manchester United who are being brazenly bled dry by foreign sharks. Their fans have it within their grasp to send out a message which would resonate across the world and shake football to its core, when they meet on March 21st at Old Trafford.

That day just happens to be 30th anniversary of Jimmy Carter announcing an American boycott of the Moscow Olympics because of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

If the feeling of disgust among the fans is as strong as it appears why not boycott Americans over their unwanted intervention in two of the world's most famous clubs? Imagine if the bulk of the fans didn't turn up and instead went on separate marches from their grounds into Liverpool and Manchester city centres?

Imagine the power of the image of a near-empty Old Trafford to the billions watching worldwide. Imagine the shame of America and the panic among Premier League bosses at the damage to their brand.

Imagine the fear among the Glazer, Hicks and Gillett families, when it dawned on them that these suckers who they believed were as easy to mug as frail pensioners had the power to bankrupt them.

Maybe that Pompey fan with the big bell and tattoos can lead one of the marches as a warning of what can happen if you don't take a stand.

Let's face it, by then he might not have a team of his own to support.

Barney Ronay in the Guardian, meanwhile, wonders what it is that these owners - or idiots, as he puts it - want.

Reading the details of the Portsmouth hearing I finally began to get sense that perhaps there might be two types of businessmen out there: ones who work in the normal world and do things like run the second biggest supplier of electrical fuse wire in Scandinavia. And the other type of businessman, the ones who get involved in football clubs. I'm no economist, and this is probably a technical term I've picked up from somewhere, like bulls and bears and stags, but for some reason the word "idiots" just keeps coming back.

The point is we shouldn't be cross with these idiots or blame them. It's not their fault that modern football is a lure for the confused; that it operates like an inverted episode of Dragons' Den, reversing the usual dynamic of a man bowling in with a plan for a kind of in-car air freshener that smells of concentrated essence of slightly dusty car and being told: "You seem furtive and crazed. For that reason I'm out." In football it's the other way round; the fruitcakes are the ones with the money. All that the people in the big chairs have to do is say: "Yes, brilliant, particularly the bit about ready-mouldered lozenges that can be dropped straight into the gear-knob well."

With this in mind I suggest we introduce a new fit-and-proper-person test that instantly disqualifies from owning a football club anyone who actually wants to own a football club. This is for their own good and can be justified on grounds of idiocy-probability.