Battle raging for soul of 'The People's Club'

PREMIER LEAGUE:The relocation of Everton from the city of Liverpool to Kirby would be a retrograde step

IF A visit to Milton Keynes can safely be equated to descending to the fourth circle of Hell, then a trip to stadium: mk - the colon is obligatory, apparently - is akin to buying a ticket for the Devil's Royal Box.

In fact, scrub that. Even an eternity being spit-roasted by Lucifer's hellish hoards or broiling in Satanic effluence has its advantages - think of the credit crunch-busting savings on heating bills - but a trip to MK? Dante himself would have been lost for words.

If you think this all sounds a touch exaggerated, then go there yourself. Take the train from London to Bletchley (that's right, Bletchley: the noise you make when you quaff a fizzy drink too quickly), turn left out of the station and keep walking.

Eventually, you'll run out of pavement. Don't worry - this is all part of the Milton Keynes experience. Totter along the grassy verge, your hair tousled by the updraft of passing lorries roaring along the A421, and after about 20 minutes you'll see it: the twinkling lights and warm glow of Ikea. Pick your way past the meatballs and standing lamps with names like 'Wastocash' or 'Spunkit' and the stadium should be right in front of you, nestling snugly next to an ASDA.

To the overwhelming majority, stadium:mk - utterly inaccessible, featureless and with as much personality as a Chicken Kiev - is a place to numb the senses and shred the soul: a fake ground for a fake club in a fake town.

But to those who effectively wield influence in our beloved game, it is probably a blueprint for the new breed of stadium, a place where the modern-day football supporter can park his saloon car, purchase some flat-pack furniture, take in "the footie" and do the weekly shopping.

It is not just the poor saps in League One who suffer these indignities. Bolton, Middlesbrough and Derby long since swapped their grand, crumbling, homes for identikit industrial estates, and Tottenham recently announced plans to ditch White Hart Lane.

Everton, meanwhile, want to turn their backs on the city of Liverpool in favour of a stadium in Kirby, joint-financed with Tesco: presumably, in due course, the team will trot out in blue and white stripes and season tickets will be replaced by Club Cards.

You might have thought we would have become immune to seeing pieces of our sporting heritage packaged up and sold to the highest bidder, but if anything the reverse is true. For Everton fans at least, uprooting their club and dumping it on a faceless retail park miles from its historical home appears to be a step too far.

Maybe it's fuelled by the age-old tensions - particularly keenly felt in Liverpool - between downtrodden tenants and their overbearing landlords; perhaps it's the fear of Buy One Get One Free deals being offered on under-performing midfielders.

Either way, the men who run Everton - 'The People's Club' , as they like to style themselves - appear hopelessly out of touch with their public.

The rest of football wishes chairman Bill Kenwright and co the very worst of luck. Newly-built grounds might be fun for all the family, with their megastores and meal deals, but they simply drag the English game further down the road of soulless American-style franchising.

Now, instead of Highbury, White Hart Lane, Burnden Park, we have titles that belong in glossy corporate catalogues: the Emirates, the Reebok or - my favourite - Darlington's 96.6TFM Arena.

Liverpool are also on the move from Anfield, recession permitting, and when they do it's hard to see a sign announcing 'This is the Dubai Investment Capital Stadium' - or whatever they call it - inspiring awe and dread in the players' tunnel.

The hawking of a stadium's identity is the most brutal way of fraying the ties between a club and its local community, but everything about the new stadium experience appears designed to dilute a supporter's primal passions.

Typically, you are lucky if you find a pub within a five-mile radius and, even if you do, you can't drink more than a pint because the stadium is located on the outer reaches of a godforsaken ring road, light years away from a train station.

Arrive later than an hour before kick-off and you won't be able to park so your only option is to sit in your bucket seat watching your life ebb away before your eyes - either that, or go to Ikea.

We all know the well-rehearsed arguments about the financial imperatives for moving - although quite why Everton think they would fill a 50,000-seater stadium when there are regularly swathes of empty seats at Goodison is anyone's guess - but there is something more precious than cash at stake here.

This is a battle for one of the last remaining fragments of football's soul and, while it might be a losing cause, we owe it to ourselves to make a stand. Otherwise we might as well decamp to Milton Keynes right now.