You can keep your prawn sandwiches, your camo-wrapped Bentleys and even the in-stadium fromagerie at the new White Hart Lane. The latest symbol of wretched excess in the world of the Premier League is the £700 charged by West Ham to the parents of the children who walk out of the tunnel alongside their players before a major home match.

What, you might have been forgiven for assuming, could be a better sign of the enduring connection between the top level of professional football and the innocent enthusiasm of children in the early stages of forming a bond with the game than the practice of inviting some of them to hold hands with players of worldwide renown and stratospheric earning power as they make their way on to the pitch? The players get some brief contact with the real world. For the children, there is a precious glimpse of the stadium from their heroes’ point of view, filled with noise and colour.

The discovery that some Premier League clubs sell the experience of walking on to the pitch before a big match enraged Gary Lineker, who tweeted: “This is awful – dreadful avarice”. He was right, and it will not have escaped his attention that Leicester, his home town club, where he started out and retains his affections, also charge mascots. True, they ask less than the £700 demanded by West Ham. Still, their fee is £600, which might put a bit of a dent in the image fostered since their miraculous title-winning season under a benevolent ownership.

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Some clubs, including some of the very biggest, make no charge for the privilege of being a mascot. Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and the two Manchester clubs are among them. It’s unlikely that Manchester City charged the sisters Vera Cohen and Olga Halon, aged 102 and 97 respectively, for accompanying the team on to the pitch before the match against Fulham last September. They were accompanied by Vera’s great-grandsons, Max and Sammy Goldsmith, aged 10 and four, in one of the most memorable moments of the season.

But plenty of others do. At Tottenham, where Daniel Levy drives such hard transfer bargains and is trying to persuade the local council to pay for cleaning up the neighbourhood before the opening of his shiny new stadium, the top charge is £405. That’s another of Lineker’s old clubs. But at a third, Everton, no money is involved. Mascots aged between five and 12 are chosen at random from members of a junior scheme and season-ticket holders. Across Stanley Park at Anfield, they are similarly selected from junior members and charity requests, without charge. That, surely, is the way to do it.

Revealed: Premier League clubs charge up to £600 for children to be mascots Read more

In the case of West Ham, the nasty taste left by the news of the £700 charge was worsened to the point of nausea by a story that broke on the same day, about a sum of money paid to their vice-chairman, Karren Brady. Already receiving a salary of £898,000 for that position, Baroness Brady – ennobled by David Cameron in 2014 for services to entrepreneurship and women in football – was given an additional £438,000 (including VAT, we are told) through her company BKB Media Ltd for consultancy work involved in the sale of 10% of the club’s shares to an American billionaire. This, we were assured by the club, “fell outside the scope of her role as vice-chairman and was paid accordingly as an external consultant”.

Well … all right. But you might like to know that the parents of a West Ham mascot, having paid £700 for an experience that also includes a training session with community coaching staff, are then required to fork out £80 for a club kit in which the child can trot out on to the pitch alongside a player.

Is it unfair to highlight West Ham? A little, perhaps, although there’s always a temptation to sling extra mud at a club whose owners managed to agree a deal to pay an annual rent of £2.5m on a 99-year lease for a stadium that cost the rest of us around £700m to build. Having made a lot of money from tearing up its roots and selling off its historic old ground to developers, now they are also coining it from crowds of 55,000, about 20,000 more than the capacity of Upton Park.

But look up the club you support and you might get a shock. Swansea were relegated to the Championship last season but dropped their mascot charge only from £450 to £399, both not including VAT. My own club, Nottingham Forest, also in the second tier, charge a range of eye-watering prices from £500 to £650, plus VAT, depending on the fixture. But Forest and Swansea, like some others, include match tickets, meals, gifts and other stuff for three other people along with the mascot, plus a full replica kit and dressing-room access for the child, which makes it seem more acceptable, if only a bit.

West Ham’s offer includes one adult ticket and a “unique personalised mascot trophy”. And, to be fair, a slightly higher standard of football, at least for now. But, as the Wall Street Journal reporters Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg remind us in The Club, an entertaining new book in which they describe the making of the Premier League, this is an institution now in the hands of two men, David Gold and David Sullivan, who made their original fortunes in “sex toys and smutty magazines”. Or, as they put it, in words that feel quite appropriate this week, “one of the few businesses seedier than English football”.