Craven Cottage under the lights is a special sight. There’s something different about the way Fulham’s unique home glistens at night that hooked me in as a child. Evening games were exciting: you got to stay up later and the history dating all the way back to Archibald Leitch felt more on display as the floodlights took effect. I love the FA Cup and feel we are so lucky to have a manager like Marco Silva at the helm. He’s a winner and his sides play the sort of football that is very easy on the eye. But I won’t be at the ground tonight to cheer on the Whites – because it is time to take a stand.

Football has long since stopped being the game of the workers and Hammersmith and Fulham property prices mean that living in the borough is certainly no longer affordable. For many of us, Fulham Football Club is the link with the past that remains in our lives – our families grew up there or took us to the ground as kids. It wasn’t for the quality of football or winning something and, when I was at school, finding a fellow Fulham sufferer as rare as winning the lottery. There weren’t many of us but we stuck together.

Most of my early memories watching Fulham were of playing with other kids on the terraces. Because the team weren’t very good, there was plenty of space. After Fulham Park Rangers and public inquiries, we sort of settled into our spot in the fourth division. We didn’t have much money but we had our ground and you knew an awful lot of the people who attended. Then, Micky Adams replaced his mentor Ian Branfoot as manager and things started to motor. The most unexpected promotion was followed by something even more sensational: Mohamed Al-Fayed buying the club and bankrolling a surge through the pyramid.

Al-Fayed might have tried to sell the Cottage to himself for property development and put a statue of Michael Jackson behind the Hammersmith End, but he listened to the ‘Back to the Cottage’ campaign and returned Fulham to their rightful place on the banks of the River Thames. He didn’t fleece the fans and employed people who understood football to keep the club moving forwards. Nobody would have predicted that Jean Tigana would have dipped into the First Division having been so successful in France, that Fulham would stay thirteen years in the top flight and reach a European final, but it all happened.

When the Whites returned to the top flight following Tom Cairney’s well-taken winner on that wonderful day at Wembley, the successors to the eccentric Egyptian provoked uproar by hiking up the ticketing prices. The Fulham Supporters’ Trust warned that this wouldn’t have the desired effect and a polite protest asking the Khans to ‘stop the greed’ caused some rancour amongst the hierarchy. The Trust put a lot of work into surveying supporters and coming up with two sets of price plans in the event that Claudio Ranieri somehow clawed a struggled side to safety, but the issue returned with a vengeance this season when season tickets went up by 17.5% and matchday prices rocketed to insane levels.

November’s ‘yellow card’ protest before the game against Manchester United put a few noses out of joint down at Motspur Park. Alistair Mackintosh, a highly regarded chief executive in footballing circles, told the Trust that their protests were not helpful. He went further, questioning whether the Trust were truly representative of the fanbase. Mackintosh didn’t see any problem with the Trust when he accepted an award for successful supporter dialogue from the Football Business Awards in 2018. He even appears in a video, with the editor of this website, praising the Trust and the fanbase.

Perhaps Mackintosh’s sudden disenchantment stems from the fact that the fans are beginning to question the general competence of the decision makers at the club. The Riverside Stand remains unfinished despite supporters shelling out £3,000 for season tickets and six years having passed since Shahid Khan’s revised scheme gained planning consent at Hammersmith and Fulham Council. The Trust were told that the Riverside project would need to be completed before the Hammersmith and Putney Ends were improved – but since the club’s directors could be snugly accommodated in the Cottage itself that wasn’t too much of a problem.

The club suggests that they need to make more revenue to cover the cash splurged by Khan senior since he bought out Al-Fayed. But this is a hierarchy unchanged from when Fulham failed Financial Fair Play by £200,000 in 2015 because they failed to get Bryan Ruiz off the books in time. The fantastical fees spent on Ivan Cavaleiro, Anthony Knockaert and Terence Kongolo – amongst others – were hardly an exercise in sound financial management after high profile signings had failed to keep Fulham in the top flight. Furthermore, in the era of massive television deals, nobody can seriously suggest that match ticket sales are going to deliver sustainability. Indeed, Fulham leapfrogged two Premier League rivals in the latest Deloitte revenue league.

Perhaps the most egregious element of all this is the utter disdain for the match going fan. The loyal supporter whose contributions made have funded the work of Fulham 2000, someone who could have been a voluntary steward in the dark days, and whose season ticket payments were vital when the club had very little. What do they get for their loyalty? In the case of this evening’s game – shamefully scheduled for a Saturday evening at the behest of television and scuppering the travel plans of several thousand Geordies – season ticket holders couldn’t even book the seat they usually sit in because Fulham have long since dispensed with a home cup tie scheme.

I love my football club. I’ve travelled across the country – and even the globe – and spent ridiculous sums of money to support the boys. I even rationalised paying the £40 on Wednesday night because the Whites don’t normally make semi-finals. But I won’t stump another £40 – or £50 as it would be on the gate tonight – because absentee owners are unwilling to recognise what makes London’s oldest professional side special. Fulham used to be a family club. If they want to claw back a vestige of dignity, the Khan family will need to take action.