FOOTBALL’s appeal has always been in the sharing of it. Everyone smells the frying onions wafting from the burger van on the way to the ground, or the medicinal vapours of vintage pipe tobacco, conjuring images of nights under lights many years before. There’s that visceral roar as an old, favourite song rumbles through the corridor of the train station, threatening to overwhelm you, followed by a sloshing pint or two in a bustling pub.

The dizzying sensation of emerging into a packed arena never grows old, even if the serried ranks around you, who hug and high-five your kids when a goal is scored, do. It just adds to the feeling of oneness.

So what kind of Premier League returns this week? One without fans is the first observation. We have already witnessed the stultifying nature of games behind closed doors. The Bundesliga returned to much fanfare last month and so far the main beneficiaries appear to be Bayern Munich, broadcast companies – 600,000 supporters watched Borussia Dortmund against Schalke on BT Sport on the first weekend back – and betting firms. Not that watching it has quenched a great thirst for that which had disappeared for so long. There is a simple reason for this – the lack of supporters within the stadium denude games of any context. Yes, there may be three points at stake but stripped of the noise and colour the spectacle is undeniably diminished.

Of course, we all know the context of three points in the Premier League title race. Should Manchester City fail to beat Arsenal on Wednesday and Liverpool defeat Everton in the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park next weekend then the only saga running longer than Boris Johnson’s hair in lockdown will virtually be at an end with only a mathematical long-shot standing between them and a 19th league crown. Certainly the disruption in Germany proved to be no obstacle to Bayern’s inexorable march to an eighth successive Bundesliga. In short, it all feels a little like going through the motions.

Clearly, the divvying up of European placings and the relegation battle takes on greater significance in light of last week’s revelation that the pandemic was set to cost Premier League clubs £1bn in revenue.

For once, the edifice upon which the Premier League has been built has been exposed; the determination to see out the season during a pandemic explains just how beholden the clubs are to television money. Meanwhile, Tottenham Hotspur’s £175m government-backed loan demonstrated the importance of a fully-operational stadium to a club that has entrusted a sizeable proportion of revenue generation to fans – of football, NFL, music, rugby, boxing or various other hues – coming through the doors.

Liverpool made a pre-tax profit of £42m and increased turnover to £533m in 2018-19 but nor have they been immune to the effects of the virus. They came in for stiff criticism following their decision to place non-playing staff on the government’s furlough scheme, eventually backtracking amid anger from all and sundry, including their own fans.

Similarly, the takeover of Newcastle by a Saudi-backed consortium has brought further opprobrium from the wider football community, while Manchester City’s appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport following UEFA’s decision to implement a two-year ban on the club for “serious breaches” of Financial Fair Play rules has brought similar scoffing.

Chelsea, themselves found guilty of a disciplinary breach pertaining to academy players and subjected to a one-window transfer ban, quickly splashed out £90m on a new forward and a winger, thus demonstrating that while a financial ill-wind has blown through the league, not everyone has felt its chill.

Finances aside, there remains an intangible sense that English football has been wounded by the disruption to normal life; even before the pandemic, the poor implementation of VAR appeared to be turning people off the product yet Sky viewing figures were up by 21 per cent for 2019 – largely, it must be said, due to high ratings for November’s fiery encounter between Liverpool and City at Anfield – so the first set of numbers from games after the resumption will prove of great interest.

Some of the crazier suggestions aimed a restoring a semblance of normality have included piped crowd sounds through the stadium and an initiative aimed at having faces of supporters superimposed onto cut-out figures that will be placed inside grounds to create “atmosphere”.

There is no such contrivance, though, when it comes to the efforts of Marcus Rashford to restore everyone’s faith in humanity at a time when society’s fractures seem a couple of inches broader than they have done for some time.

Premier League players were demonised by health secretary Matt Hancock and others as the crisis was unfolding. Rashford, though, has sailed through imperviously, doing good wherever he could.

One website published a piece entitled “six times Marcus Rashford was a better person than all of us put together” before documenting a sequence of kind deeds carried out by the Manchester United forward such as help for homeless, learning sign language so that he could present awards at a school for the deaf and other heart-warming gestures.

Indeed, the 22-year-old announced on Thursday that the target of £3m he had been seeking to raise to provide for Fareshare, a charity that provides free meals to children, had been met.

This, after the Tory government opted to stop the programme during the summer.

There are those who have damaged their reputations in this time of crisis, others such as Rashford, however, have burnished theirs. It has been a reminder, too, that football can sometimes still be about sharing.