"Football: We know how you feel about it, because we feel the same", had to be the most hypocritical piece of football related advertising, a Sky TV Premiership advert from 1997 voiced by Sean Bean.
Commercial propaganda from a company more interested in profit than the heart of the game failed to convince me that Rupert Murdoch feels the same as I do (perish the thought) given Sky has done all it can to accelerate the club v country battle that is engulfing the sport, and sided unequivocally with the clubs.
Like many an English boy in love with the beautiful game, I used to play Subbuteo and read a weekly football magazine, the newspapers being too taxing for my small brain. In my case the mag was Shoot! and looking back at it now, I realise how naive us kids were, taking Justin Fashanu's stated desire to hug and kiss his teammates at face value and believing Kevin Keegan's dream of lifting the 1982 World Cup would come true.
The stock headlines were not dissimilar from those of the tabloids, in fact, which shows the level of intelligence of those readers, and one old chestnut sticks in my mind - "It's club before country for Brian/Alan/Gary etc".
Personally I could never understand how a player could place his nation below his club if he had been a child himself, as kids all dream of playing for England above all, don't they? In the 1980s, rumours abounded that Liverpool fans did not care about their country's eleven because their club was winning everything in sight, an accusation also levelled at Napoli's tifosi when Diego Maradona graced the Stadio San Paolo in the same decade.
Now I attribute such professions of localized loyalty from hard-up '80s footballers to simple desires for more playing time or an improved contract, whereas any multi-millionaire player these days who says the same in all probability does want to play for his club more than his national team.
England's finest at the World Cup appeared to be taking it seriously with the cameras on them but I wonder how much longer they will look on international duty as an unpaid chore that can incur the wrath of their employers. I have spoken to a number of professional footballers over the past year and some told me, in so many words, that their clubs did not like them departing for national team games, especially if it meant returning jet-lagged or god forbid with an injury, and that freak 'occurrences' might suddenly appear to stop them travelling.
Three players I spoke to appeared in the 2006 World Cup Finals, and admitted to me the tournament did not cross their mind at all during the league campaign, with a strong implication it really was not the highlight of their season, let alone their career.
2006-07 will be a difficult time for European fans to disagree, what without a tournament at the end of it to cheer. These 'off-years' sandwiched either side of the World Cup and European Championship are open goals for the clubs to continue their onward and upward conquest of the Beautiful Game.
By the time of the 2008 European Championship, do not be surprised if the clubs have succeeded in forcing national associations to pay the wages and medical or insurance costs of borrowing 'their' players.
England's recent firework display in Steve McClaren's debut might on the surface appear to give some ammo to the country side of this debate but rest assured a friendly at home against a pedestrian team who failed to qualify for the World Cup will not paper over the gaping cracks.
Come the finals of a tournament again, the familiar inadequacies of the English game will resurface, the team will exit with convenient scapegoats appearing, then we will all debate where it went wrong, draw the false conclusion that the team lost because they did not have enough passion and adopt the same erroneous belief that they can win a trophy once more. Meanwhile, the inexorable rise of the big clubs will continue, aided and abetted by another ham-fisted England performance on the big stage.
The wealthy teams have pulled the wool over our eyes, with Arsenal's apparently affable coach Arsene Wenger surely the worst offender. The Alsatian, the same one who gets enraged whenever a refereeing error goes against his team but when one goes in favour claims he cannot comment 'because I did not see it', is a true enemy of international football.
He has shown little shame in stating the Champions League is a superior competition to the World Cup, shown no interest in coaching a national team despite being one of the world's best coaches and successfully led the bleating against the recent international date, scheduled oddly but not unreasonably a few days before the domestic campaign began.
Why 'unreasonably'? - Because the Premiership is not the only league in the world. La Liga for instance had an extra week's rest after the date and Serie A is not due to begin until the 10th of September. Yet Wenger's moans seemed to have found an echo with fans who only weeks before were decrying the England team's lack of cohesion and familiarity with each other.
Chelsea might spring readily to mind when one thinks of clubs only out for themselves, and with good reason, even if they are still hilariously refused entry to Europe's Elite G-14 group of power-broking clubs (Ajax, Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Internazionale, Juventus, Liverpool, Lyon, Manchester Utd, Marseille, Milan, Paris St-Germain, Porto, PSV Eindhoven, Real Madrid and Valencia).
The Blues are meanwhile steaming ahead with their own plan of world domination, if chief executive Peter Kenyon, surely as striking a symbol of the greed is good philosophy of modern football as you could find, is anything to go by:
"The first objective is to own London," he told The Independent last year to gasps of incredulity from football fans with memories. "When we talk about internationalising the brand, the first thing we want to do is get critical mass within our own territory, then start to build internationally."
Buying up Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack over the summer did not hurt as Roman Abramovich, the man who allegedly wanted to make an offer for Hyde Park as he flew over it, delves ever deeper into his bottomless pockets. Jose Mourinho is unlikely to last for much longer given his chairman's increasing interference in team affairs, but he is expendable in the bigger picture.
I confess I might feel differently were my team involved in the Champions League or in with a shout of the Premiership title, as they used to be when I read Shoot! religiously, but they are not even close. In fact they are about fifty places off the pace and de facto invisible in today's English football.
For millions of fans like me it really is country before club, as the legions of England flags with small towns emblazoned on them in Germany proved yet again. We just wish the guys wearing the shirts on the field knew how we felt about it and felt the same way.