The EDF Energy Trophy. The Carling (known to anyone with a sense of humour and a sensible taste for real ale as the C*** Fizzy Lager) Cup. The Johnstone Paints Trophy. The Pro 40 League.
The first two have infested our sports pages and demanded supporters' money this week. The latter two will do so at suitably inconvenient points of 2007. And I would like to present all of them as examples of the proposition that we play too much sport in this country.
That may seem an odd thing to hear from someone who was wanted to be a sports journalist from the age of five and has spent the last 14 years living that dream. But as the cost of watching sport rises commensurate to the sums handed to those who are paid to play it, I wonder if it's time to say the unthinkable.
The thought arises because it is increasingly obvious that the paying public isn't that interested while the players and clubs on whom these third-rate tournaments are foisted don't care for them either. The EDF Trophy and the Carling Cup are played before minimal crowds between third-choice teams simply to fill the gaps between the important tournaments - and their existence is based on the assumption that sport needs ever more money to fund ever higher wages for ever more players.
Two things have happened this week to prompt this thought. First, there was millionaire businessman Tim Watts, saviour of Pertemps Bees' wage bill in recent months, telling The Post that "I love amateur sport. I don't believe in professional sport. ..use my money to pay David Beckham more wages? I don't think so."
The second was Aston Villa handing out £9.5 million for Ashley Young, an untried 21-year-old who might be good one day but who has achieved exactly what?
Meanwhile, things like the EDF Trophy exist purely and simply to generate the funds to make rich professional sportsmen even richer.
Isn't it time to applaud quality over quantity? - to admire the Premier League as one of the best leagues in the world? to restore the FA Cup to its staus as the world's greatest cup competition? And to give our rugby players time to recover from making the Guinness Premiership the main focus of the sport in this country?
We should look for our example to the most successful professional sports league in the world, the National Football League in the United States.
$5 milion salaries are routine, television networks queue up to sign contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars and the market for merchandise spreads worldwide. And how many games do they play per season? 16.
Yet newspapers, radio, television and the internet still manage to devote acres of space to it. It can be done. It's time to throw out sport for the sake of it. After all, would anyone miss the EDF Energy Trophy?