Hundreds of Bury fans turned out to help prepare the stadium for the resumption of fixtures before the proposed takeover fell through

If you wanted an image that summed up the love and pain and hope and hopelessness of the situation that faced Bury, it was there in the August sunshine at Gigg Lane on Tuesday morning.

Around 300 supporters, all with other things to do, cleaning the stadium of a professional football club in expectation of a match that was unlikely ever to happen.

Cleaning the stadium because, well, someone has to do something, because even a funeral can be a wake, because it is better to be keeping busy than to stand back and wait for it all to come to an end.

There is no loyalty in football - except there is. You don't change clubs and you never give up on them, even when they let you down, even when they give up on you.

Bury one week, maybe Bolton the next. For those whose lives have been intertwined around matches played by these ancient stalwarts of the world's oldest league there is anger and there is an immense, heavy sadness.

But we should all be angry. If these clubs go we have all lost something special.

Football teams are our collective history, a social network that sustains far more than mere match results and league tables.

Clubs are our friends, known to us by those we know who support them. Bury is George from work and Ged from college. Bolton is old house-mate Russ and next-door neighbour Dermot. You'll have your own names and connections, a trace of your past mapped out in football grounds you may never actually visit.

A shared cultural past, a mutual understanding of what those places and institutions have meant.

You could grow up in the south and still know that Gigg Lane is Bury, just as you knew Sincil Bank is Lincoln, Deepdale Preston and Halifax The Shay.

You don't need to have borne first-hand witness to understand the relationship between supporter and stadium.

The ground is where you stood with your dad and probably where you first saw him jumping around with unrestrained joy. It's where you first used language that would get you thrown out of anywhere else. It's where you got drunk with your mates and fell about and sometimes felt sick with nerves but more often felt like you were among your own.

Bury and Bolton are your club. They share the same roots and ambitions. Their supporters care about the same things you do.

All that history, all that devotion, so close to the end.

Bury, founded in 1885, Bolton 11 years earlier. The first Football League match at Gigg Lane played 125 years ago - Manchester City beaten 4-2. Bolton one of the Football League's 12 founder members in 1888, Bury the only team, along with City after last year, to have won the FA Cup final 6-0.

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If there is bewilderment at how it has come to this there must also be fear that it is only the start. Two clubs on the brink, several more in crisis, many more teetering.

Never before has there been so vast a gap between those at the top of English football and those trying to get there. Into that gap are falling the unwary and the injudicious, the unlucky and the daft.

Manchester City's Etihad Stadium is only 25 minutes in the car and 10 or so miles from Gigg Lane but there is a world between them. It is only 21 years since Bury beat City at Maine Road in the last meeting between the two sides but it is impossible to imagine that result happening again.

You spend big in the hope of earning bigger, and if you fail you have a long way to fall. It is why the Championship can resemble a giant fixed-odds terminal, club owners throwing in money they don't have to try to beat a system that is rigged against all but the lucky and the supremely gifted.

There is chicanery and there is football's strange version of anarcho-capitalism.

Bolton owner Ken Anderson was disqualified from being a company director for eight years in September 2005 but was still allowed to take over the club. Bury's owner Steve Dale failed to show the EFL before his takeover that he had the money to run them and has failed to produce any evidence since, yet remains in nominal control.

There are sums that fail to add up and there are governing bodies that are struggling to police their own members and enforce their own regulations. The only thing that would fail the Fit and Proper test is the Fit and Proper test.

Twenty Premier League clubs will earn more than £5bn from their current three-year television deal. Meanwhile, 72 Football League clubs will earn less than an eighth of that between them across five years of their own deal.

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Gamble the house, gamble the future. Buy your own ground for an inflated price, sponsor your own kit for a similar deal.

You can hope you will get lucky but you cannot look at Bury and Bolton and know for sure that it might not be you next.

Maybe you can start again. Aldershot Town emerged from the wreckage of Aldershot FC and made it, eventually, back into the Football League. AFC Wimbledon took the power of the collective and made it define them. Regroup, re-form, start the long journey back in charge of your own fate.

You still lose too much. All those jobs, in towns that can't afford to lose them. All those creditors, the company that printed the programme, the place that made the pies, the bloke who re-did the windows.

A ground that acted as a community hub, a team that defined local identity. A kit that was distinct and original and had been that way for decade after decade, a crest and a badge that was yours and yours alone.

All those songs, those chants, the proud boasts and the obscene taunts. All those players, all the records they created, good and bad.

All those supporters, tied to something they do not want to leave behind. Cleaning the stadium, because someone has to do something.