Right then. Nine Premier League clubs can't find anyone to stick their name on the front of a shirt. Nine. That's nearly half the league walking out next season looking like they've just been unwrapped from a cellophane packet. And the reason? The gambling companies have been told to sling their hook and nobody else wants to pay the bill.

Don't get me started.

Actually, do get me started. Because I've been waiting years for this.

In my day, shirt sponsors were local. They were honest. You'd have a double glazing firm from Rotherham or a carpet warehouse in Stoke plastered across your chest and you were proud of it. You knew where you stood. Dave's Windows. Sponsoring football. Lovely. Now it's all BetSlam365 and CashOutKing and whatever other nonsense has been flashing at fans for the last decade, training an entire generation to think that putting a tenner on Brentford to win 3-2 with a red card in the 78th minute is a perfectly normal Saturday afternoon.

So forgive me if I'm not weeping into my Bovril about the £80m hole this has apparently left in the Premier League's pocket. Eighty million. These clubs earn more than the GDP of a small island nation from telly money alone. They'll survive. Trust me.

But here's the thing that really gets me. The clubs are panicking. Panicking! Running around like headless chickens because they can't find a replacement. One executive told the Guardian the collective loss could be as high as £80m. And I thought, hang on. You've known this ban was coming for how long? Years. Actual years. And you did nothing. You sat there counting your gambling money, assuming it would last forever, and now the music's stopped and you haven't got a chair.

That's the problem with modern football. Nobody plans. Nobody thinks past the end of next week. I had to plan three months of training sessions around one set of bibs and a bag of flat footballs at Barrow. These lot can't even sort out who's going on the shirt twelve months in advance.

And you watch what happens next. You just watch. They'll fill the void with something worse. Crypto. Vape companies. Some app that nobody's heard of run by a bloke in Dubai who disappears six months later. We've seen it before. Remember all those dodgy sponsors that turned up, slapped their logo on everything, then vanished like a centre half at a corner kick? We'll get a fresh batch of those. Mark my words.

The big six are fine, of course. They always are. Manchester United will have their billions from whoever fancies global brand exposure this week. Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea. They'll be sorted by Tuesday. It's the rest who'll suffer. The Bournemouths. The Ipswichs. The clubs who actually need the money to compete and who were getting a decent chunk of change from the gambling firms because nobody else was interested.

Here's my radical suggestion, and I know people will think I've gone soft. Leave the shirts blank. Just leave them. A nice clean shirt with a badge on it. Remember those? Remember when you could see the actual colour of the shirt without it being covered in seven different logos and a QR code? I managed teams whose shirts had one sponsor and it was usually peeling off by October anyway. Nobody cared. The football was the same.

Better, actually.

Look, the gambling ban is the right thing. I've seen what it does to people. I've seen lads in my dressing rooms over the years get sucked in. So good riddance. But if these clubs think they deserve sympathy for losing money they should never have been so dependent on in the first place, they can think again.

Sort yourselves out. Or play in blank shirts. Either way, I'm not losing sleep over it.

Dave's Windows is probably still going, mind. Someone give them a ring.