Time to stand up for armchair fans over FA Cup kick-off row At its heart is the notion of what it means to be a 'real fan," a term much abused of late. There is an entrenched view that devotion to football can only properly be demonstrated through live attendance, in the same way that rich families used to fill the front pews at church in the belief that they would somehow be closer to God. This is as much falsehood as truth. Of course, there is a reason Lowry never painted a picture called Sitting At Home Watching The Match Whilst On Betfair. It is the romance of the ritual, the tradition passed from parent to child that is encased in long toilet queues, pockets of noise, the clatter of plastic seats as an entire crowd stands as one. Football is something that needs to be touched, and Going To The Match is the only way to grasp its fullest, richest expression. But not all of us can get there. Low-income families were priced out of top-level football long ago. For vast swathes of the congregation, television is the best, easiest or only way of getting to the front pews. Today's Manchester City fan is as likely to be sitting in front of a computer screen in Manila as in the Colin Bell Stand eating a £5 burger. Both are indulging their passion as fully as they can, but while one is seen as part of the solution, one is seen as part of the problem. And yet the dichotomy is so clearly false. An overused phrase in recent days has been "whatever you thought of her politics," a clause generally deployed to soften the ground for the more contentious "Margaret Thatcher was ------ brilliant." But there is a nobility to the sentiment: a cheerily ambitious grasp at consensus, a pitch for common ground, a hopelessly idealistic wish that perhaps, somewhere on this cosmically dizzying snooker table of infinite angles, there may yet be some cause with which we can all align. The division of football's satisfyingly broad church into 'real" and 'armchair" segments runs antithetically to all this. It ignores television's evangelical dimension: those extra viewers may well be persuaded to buy a ticket next time. It carries the unmistakable ring of middle-class snobbery. Most of all, it ignores the fact that the game is never more powerful and uplifting than when it breaks down divisions rather than erects them. Which, ironically, is one of the reasons Thatcher hated it so much .