Those who feel strongly that monopolies are bad for customers, and bad for the image of marketing – and witness the shameful licensed exploitation of millions of Olympic fans by Visa, McDonalds et al, courtesy of wimpy Lord Coe and his team – will be cheered by a recent legal ruling against the powerful football Premier League.

To protect its sale of very lucrative broadcasting rights the bullying League funded a legal action, brought by their puppets at Brent and Harrow trading standards services against a Wembley man, Helidon Vuciterni, accused of importing Albanian satellite decoder cards which allow Premier League matches to be watched at monopoly-free prices, thus potentially saving football-fan customers hundreds of pounds.

Fortunately for fairness the judge was not as beholden to the Premier League as the trading standards poodles, and said so, pointing out that the poodles rendered the warrants against Vuciterni unlawful because they did not disclose a European Court of Justice opinion that our national laws prohibiting the sale of the money-saving cards were contrary to the freedom to provide services.

One would have thought trading standards officers and their puppet-masters at the Premier League would have known that, wouldn’t one?