Who are you going to vote for in the forthcoming general election (apologies to those too young or too foreign or too incarcerated to vote in this exciting poll)?
Many people say the big parties are all the same with pretty similar plans for cuts, tax rises and promises to clamp down on bankers.
But what if politicians started taking a look at that other example of get rich quick capitalism gone mad, English football?
Sounds fanciful? Well yes and no. The Taylor Report led to legislation that governs aspects of the game so the precedent is there. The Labour government has considered regulating football in the past but was convinced by the Football authorities that "self regulation" worked. Now we know it really doesn't.
Take the travails of United, Liverpool, Pompey, West Ham and Hull (just to focus on the Premier League) and that's a lot of unhappy voters looking for something to be done.
So I was pleasantly surprised by this article in the Telegraph suggesting a football regulator is being discussed in Whitehall. To quote the Telegraph:
"In what would be one of the most controversial political interventions into sport in history, football could effectively lose the right to run its own affairs in the wake of a string of financial crises that have hit a number of leading clubs.
Instead the game would be effectively run under licence from a regulator similar to watchdogs which currently oversee the communications industries and privatised utilities."
Now with an election coming, thoughts being mulled in Whitehall now will probably be of no relevance in the summer, but the subject is something for politicians and voters to consider.
This is our national sport, it is a disgrace and its administrators and owners have proved themselves incapable of reforming it.
If I was a parliamentary candidate I'd be wondering why my party didn't adopt such a popular and cheap policy. And as a voter, maybe it would become harder to dismiss them as "all the same".
LUHG
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