Right. So the Premier League has officially secured at least five teams in next season's Champions League. Five. Not four. Five. Because apparently finishing fourth wasn't generous enough. Now we've got something called a "European Performance Spot" which sounds like something dreamt up by a bloke in a glass office who's never stood on a freezing terrace in his life.

In my day, you got two spots. Two. And one of them had to go through a qualifier where you might lose to some Moldovan side with a ground smaller than my local Tesco. That was proper jeopardy. That was football.

Now? Fifth place gets you a seat at the top table. Let me rank the seven reasons this is a disgrace to the game I love.

7. It rewards mediocrity. Fifth place used to mean you'd had a decent season but not a great one. Now it means continental glory. What's next? A wildcard for the team with the best social media engagement? Don't laugh. Someone at UEFA has probably already pitched it.

6. It makes the league season meaningless. Half the drama of the Premier League was that top four race. The agony. The final day chaos. Now you can stumble over the line in fifth and still get the big anthem on a Tuesday night. That's the problem with modern football. Nobody has to suffer any more.

5. It turns the Champions League into the Premier League Invitational. Five English clubs. Plus however many Spanish, German, Italian sides they shoehorn in. The tournament's already got 36 teams in the league phase, which is about 20 too many. Now we're adding more from the same leagues. Where's the variety? Where's the romance? I once took my side to play a pre-season friendly against a Swedish third division team and it was more culturally enriching than whatever this bloated mess has become.

4. It kills the Europa League. The Europa League used to be where fifth and sixth place teams went to have a proper adventure. Ollie Watkins is out there right now doing brilliant things for Villa in that competition. But if fifth place goes straight to the Champions League, what happens to the tier below? It becomes a wasteland. A nothing tournament. Even more than some people already think it is.

3. Fixture congestion will break players. Don't get me started. We're already moaning about too many games. Players dropping like flies. And the solution is to put MORE English teams into MORE European matches? Genius. Absolute genius. Someone get UEFA a Nobel Prize.

2. It's pure greed dressed up as merit. They call it a "performance spot" like it's some sort of academic scholarship. It's not. It's money. More Premier League teams in the Champions League means more broadcast revenue, more sponsorship deals, more cash sloshing around at the top while League One clubs are holding bake sales to fix the floodlights.

1. It makes the rich richer. Again. The same five or six clubs will rotate through those five spots every year. The gap between the haves and have-nots gets wider. The smaller Premier League sides become feeder clubs. The pyramid crumbles a bit more. And some suit in Nyon pops champagne because the revenue projections look healthy.

I managed for twenty years in the lower leagues. We used to dream about cup runs that might, just might, lead to something magical. Now the big clubs don't even have to dream. They just have to not be catastrophically terrible and Europe comes to them on a silver platter.

Five spots. In my day, you got what you earned. Now you get what the coefficient says you deserve.

Football's not dying. But it's definitely on a ventilator built by accountants.