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It’s a bit like joining your local bird-watching club because you want to catch some of the little feathered things and sell them to your mates. You sign up with the twitchers and conservationists, join them on an outing, take out your shotgun and cages then wonder why they get upset.

Or the women who wanted to join the venerable Marylebone Cricket Club purely because it was a men-only institution, and had been for more 200 years, and it offended their sensibilities when they were initially rejected.

Why would anyone want to join a club when they didn’t agree with its aims and values?

But it happens, and now it appears to be happening to perhaps one of the richest and most exclusive clubs in the world: the English Premier League.

Recent reports suggest some of the new foreign club owners don’t like the idea of relegation and are looking at ways to ringfence their investment by doing away with the whole thing. A strange thing, you might think, for a businessman to do, shy away from risk. But of course, many of the owners of EPL clubs did not make their money in the free market and the prospect of competition, and relegation, obviously scares them.

There are quite a few American owners now in the upper echelons of English football, including at Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United. The whole notion of relegation is alien to our cousins from across the pond, much like the idea a sporting contest can be bitterly fought and end up a draw.

The Americans have tried tinkering with the game before. During the old North American Soccer League days, when players like Pele and George Best wooed the locals, draws were done away with, replaced by shootouts and a 35-yard line designed to eliminate offside traps. The NASL eventually faded and with it the 35-yard line, and the rest of the world went back to inconclusive matches.

Then there was the time it was mooted more breaks would be introduced to the game to keep the sponsors and TV stations happy. Again, luckily for those of us in the old world who were set in our prehistoric ways, that also never materialized.

The idea of an EPL being without relegation won’t get too far. Despite the crass commercialism that hangs around the game today, the English football fan still has a romantic streak and loves seeing clubs like Reading, Blackpool or Swindon Town momentarily mixing it with the big boys, getting all starry-eyed at Villa Park, Anfield and Old Trafford before returning to their natural place in the football universe.

It is this romance, coupled with 113 years of relegation history since Bolton Wanderers and Sheffield Wednesday were the first teams to experience the drop, that will, hopefully, blow this daft idea out of the water.

We must send a message to these cashed-up owners that, yes, you may have invested a few bob in our football league, but you will never get close to the very heart of the game that generations have grown up with just so you won’t get labeled a loser next time you get together with your champagne-swilling mates in Monaco.