This weekend Reuters reported that some Danish football fans will be given the chance to watch games as if they were a drive-in movie when their season re-starts next month.

With matches set to be played behind closed doors, the Superliga side Midtjylland has installed giant screens in a car park outside its stadium where fans will be able to watch the action from their cars.

Meanwhile, the players will be able to see the footage of the fans on screens set-up within the stadium.

It's a fascinating prospect which raises deep questions about the dynamics of sport and its following – along with concerns over its safe implementation.

"We're working hard to create the best possible experience," Midtjylland's marketing director, Preben Rokkjaer, told the BBC.

"The coronavirus does not change that, it just provides some other preconditions."

Rokkjaer said the club were in touch with the police, the Herning municipality and the stadium authorities to create a safe framework and provide security for all fans.

The Superliga plans to restart on May 17 with the aim of concluding the season by the end of July.

The club said that more than 2,000 of their 12,000 parking spaces will be opened up around the club's stadium, and fans will also be able to access TV commentary through their car radios.

They added that the success of the initiative in the first game will determine whether more places can be offered to fans.

Clearly it will be important to see how spectators involved behave themselves with regard to the required social distancing.

Speaking personally from lockdown in my home in the Charente region of France – when I have made infrequent visits to the local Super-U to buy food, I have seen people parked up next to each other chatting through the open window.

I have also seen – less so now, but more often a couple of weeks into lockdown – groups of, mostly, young men either leaning against the outside of their cars or sitting on the bonnets and chatting together.

Presumably the former behaviour is safer. But in an ideal world should there be social distancing between cars when the drive-in football experiment begins?

How will excited groups of followers react during the course of a match? And how taxing in terms of personnel and finance will monitoring and maintaining safe behaviour in the car park prove to be?

There are precedents already in these coronavirus days – for instance, drive-in movies are currently popular in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.

But the dynamics for watching films and sport are very different.

While certain films may provide moments where cinema-goers – and drive-in cinema-goers – feel moved to react as one, with relief, or horror, or jubilation, the forces in operation on those who watch football, particularly as committed followers, are generally more visceral.

Aside from the practicalities of this proposed viewing option, there are some deeper issues involved.

As my colleague David Owen wrote recently following the announcement by the Bundesliga, one of Europe's big five leagues, to seek a behind-closed-doors re-start to its season in early May –  it is fruitful to follow the money…

He points out that UEFA's fiscal 2018 club licensing bench marking report delineates "the gulf between the big boys and the rest very clearly", adding: "Its analysis of 55 national European leagues shows that only three outside the top 20 derive even 10 per cent of their revenue from television.

"Even within this top 20, only Turkey and Portugal are remotely as TV-dependent proportionately as the big five.

"Within this big five – the Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1 – the proportion of aggregate revenue derived from domestic TV ranges from 34 per cent to 53 per cent. The equivalent range for gate receipts is 12 per cent to 18 per cent."

He adds: "There can be no clearer way of telling live fans they are expendable than by staging games they are unable to attend. It is the logical extension of the endless jiggling around with kick-off times to suit broadcast schedules that regular fans have had to become accustomed to.

"In another sense, the vast, echoing, empty arenas will emphasise how much supporters are missed, and how much they contribute. Only now they contribute chiefly as 'extras', rather than the life and soul of the community that spawned the club in the first place."

The over-arching question of whether actual spectators have been reduced to the level of "extras" – as opposed to "ultras" – is one that applies to elite sport up to and including the Olympics.

The Danish announcement is an effective rebuttal of this argument, however.

What difference does it make for a spectator that they are geographically closer to the action when they watch a TV screening you could equally well see at home? Because it clearly does make a difference. And the answer is surely tribal, with its roots in a sense of community.

With the additional resonance that nothing confirms belonging so much as gathering in the face of a common adversary.

In footballing terms there is a tradition broadly acknowledged that playing "at home" gives a team an advantage. When that is expressed in terms of a baying crowd pent close to the touchlines, it is clear how such an advantage manifests itself.

But what level of "home advantage" might be supplied by images of a car park?

If this phenomenon catches on it will be fascinating to try and analyse what, if any bonus is conferred upon home players by the knowledge that they have "back-up" just outside the arena.

But just as importantly, for those providing the outside "back-up", there will surely be the renewed sense of a common cause, of a vividly shared experience, in which the soul of the game resides.