Vintage football club, 105,000 miles, many careless owners, bodywork in need of attention, roof owned by third party, interior worn but a good little runner, MOT until May, fitted with sought after Neil Warnock optional extra, financial constraints force sale. £10,000,000 ono.

It sounds strange, selling a football club in the same way as a used car or house doesn’t it? Brendan Guilfoyle however thinks differently and has decided to place an advert for the club in the Financial Times of all places.

How can the administrators possibly make it sound like a good buy in that medium? We are a club that is in need of a major investment of both time and money, that is haemorrhaging money with a dwindling customer base.

When you add to the mix the complexities surrounding the ownership of Selhurst Park it becomes an even less attractive proposition.

He may as well have taken it out in Auto Trader.

At least then Reading’s owner John Madjeski could put the money towards any debt we owe them, which we surely do, we seem to owe everybody else at least something at the moment.

I might be wrong but you would expect that anyone interested in investing in football at the moment would realise that we are well and truly up for sale.

However, Guilfoyle insists that it has been worthwhile and 20 interested parties have come out of the woodwork but that, 'there are some time-wasters around inevitably in football'. These were presumably ‘tyre kickers’ scared off by the fuel consumption.

Luckily, buying a club of our stature is not a sensible decision made with good judgement, it’s a gut decision driven by emotion.

You can’t boil a football club down into figures and marketing bumph because when you do, no one in their right mind would buy into football. If that was the way life worked, football wouldn’t be as important as it is.

You can’t get across in an advert what a club means to the people who love it. You can’t get across that Crystal Palace brings together whole generations of families, the friendships that have built up over the years in the terraces, the elation of promotion or the despair of relegation.

Maybe this is a naïve view considering the mess life-long fans Mark Goldberg and Simon Jordan have made of the club by letting their emotions influence their decisions.

But I would much prefer our club to be run by people who understand it rather than any investor who is somehow tempted by an advert in the Financial Times. Essentially I would rather have it run into the ground by a fan than by a faceless businessman trying to make money like the Glazer family at Manchester United.