“People think that all you need is the ability to write words and use a camera and a microphone. The notion that there might be some ethics behind this is genuinely alien to some people. They wonder why they need an intermediary.” He sees the argument that the best source of news about a club is the club itself as “profoundly misleading”, adding: “They are not trying to tell the truth, they are trying to con their fans into believing that they will get the truth out of what will be a packaged corporate PR exercise.”

Edwards says: “In the past, clubs banned people if what they wrote was not true. But now, journalists are banned just because the club does not like a story they wrote.”