FOOTBALL is often accused of being as detached from reality as it is possible to be. It wasn’t always like that, though.

I recall, and I won’t state which club for reasons of Twitter abuse, standing in a stadium car park as a wide-eyed kid, yearning for a glimpse of the heroes I worshipped on the pitch.

Many would arrive in posh cars of that era (we’re talking about the 1980s here) so you’d get the odd Porsche and maybe a Mercedes estate for those players with families.

My favourite player of that time, though, drove an old Ford van. He played like one at times, too, but I digress.

You’d never see a vehicle like that these days among the Bentleys, Range Rovers and bespoke AMGs. The game has changed. The game has ‘gone’ as one of my colleagues prefers to say.

But the one constant underpinning the money, the cars, the endorsements and the wall-to-wall TV coverage is the supporters. The ones who pay the aforementioned ‘hard-earned’, both for often over-priced tickets and over-priced satellite dishes on the sides of their semi-detached houses.

So what a shame that these people, most of whom do more graft in two hours than many footballers do in a week, are so often forgotten by the clubs they adore. With success comes nescience, it seems.

Yet football clubs are still businesses, albeit businesses seemingly in a world of their own, where money does grow on trees. So, with the business theory in mind, AFC Bournemouth’s somewhat half-hearted attempt to redress Tuesday night’s ticketing issues really didn’t cut the mustard.

For all of the wonderful work that has been done by Eddie Howe and the players on the pitch to take the club to a place nobody sound of mind ever thought it could reach - the Premier League - it’s the sour tastes that linger longest.

Forget the goals, the glory and the big stadium away days that are forming life-long memories, or even the fabulous work the club does in the community, supporting charities and working with youngsters: ‘Remember that time we queued outside the ground for hours, with kids in tears, to collect our tickets and missed half the game’?

The apology came quickly, yet was brief and to the point. ‘Lessons will be learned’, essentially, a stock phrase in the world of public relations offensives which actually means nothing and is a soundbite previously condemned on these pages by this correspondent.

The customer is not always right, but businesses should have a knack of making them think they are. Why is it so incomprehensibly difficult for the business of football to follow rule number one of the commercial world?

The answer is because they feel they don’t need to. And I go back to the ‘constant underpinning’ in paragraph six of this column. The supporters will always be there, in the case of AFC Bournemouth, through administrations and buckets at the Winter Gardens.

The Premier League is their reward, but on nights like Tuesday, it certainly wouldn’t have felt that way. AFC Bournemouth can be better than that and the club needs to prove it.