What I mean is, does the primarily local, personal-experience-based route into sport that has moulded my sporting life, and those of the vast majority of sports fans older than me, remain important, or has its pathfinding role been usurped by the ubiquitous screen?

Whether it be Lionel Messi and Sergio Busquets pitching up in Miami or seemingly every other footballer with an international profile heading for Saudi Arabia, an awful lot of money seems to be getting staked this summer on the ability of screen-based products to shape how sports fans spend their time and cash.

Will admirers of Cristiano Ronaldo want to watch Al Nassr games because the Portuguese striker now plays there?

Will they want a replica shirt? Might they even consider a trip to Riyadh to watch him live?

The sort of sums being thrown at star footballers can only be justified if these fortunate individuals succeed in massively boosting interest in their new employers and associated other interest-groups, and realistically, for all Messi’s potential sway among Hispanic-American communities, the vast majority of any such additional interest is going to be screen-based.

I come from an age-group for which club brands, insofar as we ever thought about such things, were much stronger than player brands.

If a player leaves the team I mainly follow - Bristol City, having attended many games as a child/teenager - well, my interest in said player tends to tail off fairly precipitously.

To give another example from the realm of cricket, I have always followed Somerset because that was my local club growing up.

Somerset happens not to be represented in the new-fangled short-form competition The Hundred, whose third season begins next month, even though some Somerset players will be involved; consequently I have almost zero interest in this new competition.

It would appear that young Emmanuel Macron, the French President, (17 years my junior), shares at least some of this sense of the importance of rootedness and the power of club brands in sport: that is assuming recent reports of a phone call from the Ėlysée to the Chinese owners of ailing FC Sochaux are well-founded.

Sochaux may not be familiar to some readers, but the club was strong enough to win two French titles in the 1930s.

The town, and neighbouring Montbéliard where its ground is located, is typical of the sort of industrial centres that often spawned successful football clubs in Europe in the pre-TV age, for decades hosting one of the main Peugeot car-manufacturing plants.

This is all very well, but even if people of my, and Macron’s, age might not be much inclined to develop a consuming interest in Miami just because Messi is playing there, what about the, ahem, younger demographic?

This requires an understanding of how kids and young adults use screens to help navigate a path through life.

Clearly, I am far from the best-qualified individual to pronounce on this, but I would say the real game-changer in recent times has been interactivity.

New tech empowers all of us to transmit a running commentary on what matters to us - or what we want people to think matters to us - into the ether with just a few key-strokes.

For the millions, probably billions, of people who keep this up on a semi-regular basis, their avatar becomes almost more real than they are to all but the few dozen friends and relatives who know them best.

If a sports property can make itself so cool that it becomes desirable for a significant number of these active commentators to demonstrate their affinity with and/or superior knowledge of that property to their personal audiences, then that can be very valuable.

You cannot keep up an intelligent commentary on player X’s contribution to an Al-Hilal or Al-Ittihad game without access to live coverage of the match. You might, moreover, judge it essential to your credibility to be sporting a replica shirt while you do so.

But - and I think it is an enormous "but" - for many such individuals, their most significant motivation will be a desire to burnish their personal e-image rather than any more deep-seated attachment to the sports property itself.

Should said property cease to be cool, a substantial proportion of them would move on, just as in glam-rock days, T Rex passed the baton to Slade who passed it onto Mud and the Bay City Rollers, all at unpredictable intervals for unfathomable reasons.

Contrast such fickleness with the often life-long fidelity of those attracted to sports teams because they were part of the fabric of the local communities where they came of age.

No, it does not have to be an "either/or" thing: I suppose if I really wanted to I could make room in my life for both Bristol City and Al Nassr.

But the sporting calendar is ever more jam-packed with competing calls on the aficionado’s attention and not even the most dedicated couch potato has infinite reserves of time let alone money.

Yes, to judge by the number of Manchester City and even Barcelona shirts worn by children in my neighbourhood park, the tradition of following a local team, however obscure, through thick and thin is far from the near-automatic reflex it once was; given the pace and mobility of modern life, this is completely understandable not to say inevitable.

But can a solely or mainly screen-based relationship breed the sort of brand loyalty that over a lifetime can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for a particular sports property and those who seek to hitch their wagon to it?

I remain to be convinced.