"I tend to just have cereal before a game, probably a bowl of coco pops. The normal ones, not the moons and stars."

Hidden away amongst last week's thrilling dispatches from the front lines of football was a genuinely spleen-blowing news story, yet it passed from public consciousness without so much as a raised eyebrow or flipped-over breakfast table.

Here's a brief run-down of recent events - see if you can spot the revelation.

Firstly, Portsmouth FC went into administration, before heaving itself out of the grave and back onto its feet. It turns out that kicking a leather ball around on a grassy field can be a high-risk venture, so if you ever have a yen for a kick-about I'd recommend putting aside £135m to cover possible expenses. Portsmouth didn't, and are now teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Good work guys.

Fact fans: having entered the search term '£135m' into my Googlematic Computron...

">hello"

...I now know that such a sum might pay for two 2.7km tunnels in Hong Kong, the “greatest extension to the British Museum for almost a century”, or Greenstar UK, the largest recycling company in Britain.

Or alternatively, it could bring an ailing football team's balance sheet back up to zero, so that they can continue to put shorts on and frolic in the fresh air whilst an assembled crowd applauds them.

Hardly a choice, really.

Then, Wayne Rooney's vacillation over whether he would stay with his current employer or move to a different one gripped the nation by the balls and just wouldn't let go. Change jobs? Not change jobs?

OH GOD, JUST TELL US WAYNE.

How do you expect us to get anything done while you're idly musing aloud about which direction to take your career in? He scratches the crown of his ape-like skull with one dangling paw; the other drums across his silently muttering lips. Finally, ponderously, a word coalesces at the forefront of an otherwise barren mind: “Buuuuurrrr...stay? Stay.”

Boss/twat-herder Alex Ferguson then realises that Rooney is the Kasparov to his Karpov; he has been outplayed by the master. As Wayne shields his eyes against the obscenely bloated wads of cash that Ferguson is now pelting at his face, we can imagine him thinking smugly to himself 'check mate, sir...check mate.'

In so doing however, we are already imagining a world in which Wayne Rooney has played chess and understood its rules, and where he is also capable of maintaining some kind of interior dialogue. In reality he was probably making a hopeless attempt to divide £15m by the hourly rate of Jennifer Thompson, his favouritest prostitute in all the world.

So, he stays.

At this conclusion, the group of protesters who had been camped outside his mansion howling into the void of his indifference stopped and looked at themselves, then at each other, before slinking off back to their homes. As they do so, each concocts in his head some fantastic lie that will explain his absence to the normal people back home when they ask him why he missed work/dinner/his parole hearing.

Finally, Newcastle United striker Andy Carroll was charged with assaulting his ex-girlfriend. Stay classy, Andy! But not just you – please join the supporters of the Serbian national team in the showers as they too have been red-carded, their violence towards Italian players and fans at a recent 'friendly' match disqualifying them from a game I like to call 'conducting yourself with a modicum of propriety, so that your parents needn't be ashamed of you'.

That is what passes for news in a packed week of ball-footing. Now, if you're anything like me (and pretty much everyone is), one particular juncture in the article prior you'll have spat a mouthful of cognac all over your manservant as he read it to you, dropping a lit cigar onto your crotch in the process:

This man owns a mansion