Many football league clubs are now struggling financially and there have been many ways put forward by several different people on how we can all help amend the situation, with one of the most radical ideas of those thought up has been regionalisation. This means that the lower football leagues will be divided into different league depending on their position in the country.

This format is being used in non-league football at the moment. Leagues here are normally regionalized to minimize traveling costs which can be very hard for smaller clubs with lower fan bases.

This idea is not one that has proved popular with the regular football fan, though, who enjoys their trips up and down the country following their team and seeing the different cities, stadiums and sites around the country. However, these trips can also be tiring for players and officials who will not enjoy being forced to stay in hotels in cities they don't know overnight.

But the system of regionalisation in PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL is not an entirely new one. This has been carried out before back in 1921 when the decision to divide the English lower divisions in to Northern and Southern parts with clubs in the Midlands like Nottingham Forest, Derby, Walsall etc being forced to switch between them based on the position of teams being promoted to those divisions. These divisions would feed one club apiece to the Second Division which remained a national league.

Regionalisation, however was scrapped with Division Three (North) and Division Three (South) being reformed as Division Three and Division Four In 1958. The idea was scrapped for some reason, I mean it was all working out fine, maybe the FA just fancied a change?

With various television companies manly being set-up in the south of the country many northern clubs would miss out on television revenues if this league format was to take effect, they would prefer to take their cameramen on a short trip rather than travel miles every time they want to show a Newcastle game whether home or away.

Below the conference the league is split up into three separate divisions, covering the North, Middle and South of England and Wales. This is due to the traveling costs involved, which is obviously difficult for smaller clubs with low fan bases, so not going long distances for league matches saves some strain on finances. With the money troubles many Football League clubs are experiencing, why not a system like this be brought back into our professional leagues?

In my humble opinion, I don't think that the general public are looking for it, nor do I think that it's what the Football League clubs really want. Part of the beauty of the national obsession is that it is a 'national' obsession which pits teams from different parts of the country against each other. A local derby wouldn't be as special if all the teams were local now would it.

Maybe at the start many people would be down at their teams stadium to watch a local derby, and for a while this would boost gate receipts, but in the end these games would lose all special meaning and every game would just be another game.

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