The Football Association announced this week that it is considering taking bids from major global cities for English Premiership football matches to be held overseas.

There is something deeply unpleasant about this. Most of us have a deep affinity for a football team; I've been an Aston Villa supporter all my life, as were my father and grandfather. Villa Park is just two miles from where for more than a hundred years our factory was situated in Hockley, Birmingham. I go to a couple of matches each year, and have done ever since the days that we used to be able to stand and sway with the crowd in the Holte End.

And that's the point. Football is about community. Its about spirit, and passion, and fitness, and loyalty.

Yet here we have the FA suggesting taking new big matches to foreign soil just to raise more money. There's something rotten in the state of football. Premiership players, many of whom have no other talent, and who all too often are very fragile characters, are paid twice as much in one week than most of the loyal fans who pay up to £600 per year to see them. The money in football is in danger of ruining the game, destroying the English national team, and creating yet more tribal rivalry that simply is not conducive to a cohesive society.

If it were more socially responsible, what the FA should do is to put a cap on players wages; £50,000 per week (sometimes far more) for booting a bloated pig's bladder around a patch of grass is simply offensive. The FA should require that more of the profits of Premiership football are ploughed back into the game at its grass roots, so that more boys and girls across Britain get a chance to be fit and not quite so fat.

As for Villa v United in LA? It would be more likely an Ealing comedy than a Hollywood blockbuster, despite Tom Hanks's endorsement of my team. What a turn off.