The new football season in England and West Ham are about to be headline news.

The new football season in England and West Ham are about to be headline news.

No sooner has the football World Cup become yesterday's fish and chip paper then the new football season in England dawns brightly on our doorsteps. Soon we'll be hearing the thunderous rumble of football's waggons charging through the Wild West saloon town that is the Premier League. You'll be hearing a whole load of cowboys with cigarettes in their mouths, threatening a complete takeover and demanding Bourbons almost immediately. This is no time for showing any pity pard'ner because this is a one horse town and those boys with their rooting tooting guns mean some serious business.

But seriously folks the new football season is back this weekend and football fans from every corner of the country will be dusting down their scarves, oiling their vocal chords, bellowing out their boisterous songs and pinning their colours to their respective masts. Football loves to be the centre of attention and once again the summer solstice in England which this year was a positively remarkable sight to behold, is slowly dropping anchor on a sun kissed portside and ready to take its place in the history books.

Tomorrow, thousands of referees and linesmen and lineswomen will walk out into state of the art football stadiums that are slowly and increasingly turning into lavish hotels rather than football stadiums. They will be dressed in the whole rainbow spectrum of colours, some in red, some in blue, some in green and some in goodness knows what combination of shades before marching towards the centre circle where Sky TV cameras will witness the ritual of perhaps a mauve, purple and orange football that could have been manufactured anywhere.

Last season of course Manchester City, the new Premier League champions, won the Premier League by such a sizeable margin that police were sending out search parties to find out where exactly City had taken the trophy. The brand of football that City delivered throughout all of last season was so breathlessly inventive and groundbreakingly innovative that many of us had run out of superlatives by February let alone the season's conclusion in May.

But tomorrow the whole of the Premier League will start with a clean slate and a new desk in the classroom, new teachers, new players and new managers. Some of our less fashionable of clubs will be parading what can only be described as a fantasy football team of all stars. For those of us of  a claret and blue allegiance it was the kind of summer that bordered on the unbelievable and the indescribable.

New West Ham manager Manuel Pellegrini, who once led the aforesaid Manchester City to the Premier League title, has now been entrusted with perhaps the ultimate of all footballing challenges. West Ham have invested in the thick end of almost £100 million in an effort to transform the club's fortunes quite dramatically and win back the fans who threatened to desert them when things were going wrong last season.

Shortly into the second half of West Ham's Premier League 3-0 home defeat to Burnley a disaffected minority of West Ham fans, clearly annoyed with the club's downward spiral to relegation, made their feelings patently clear. One fan, strangely in possession of a corner flag, stormed his way purposefully to the centre circle, planting the flag firmly and angrily into the centre circle. Another disgruntled supporter had to be dragged away by the police and another day in the life of a Premier League team slipped away in a wholly grotesque fashion.

But now West Ham have signed at least ten new players many of whom their most critical supporters must have thought would never even contemplate a move to the London Stadium after the events of that day. It was a gradual conversion to the claret and blue gospel, a veritable busload of new faces making their presence felt in Stratford, East London.

 In a steady procession there was full back Ryan Fredericks, a promising and allegedly lightning quick defender with a clear vision of the future. And then there was the man some of us had been waiting patiently for with bated breath. In fact some of us had been tracking the development of the on and off transfer on both social media and that marvellous medium known as You Tube.

It has to be said that here and now that Jack Wilshere is undoubtedly one of the classiest  midfield players England have given us for quite some time. But Wilshere is finally a West Ham player and from a personal point of view this has to be one of West Ham's best signings for many a season. It isn't often that you found yourself totally enraptured by the extraordinary gifts of one player but Wilshere fits into the category very snugly.

After a turbulent, injury prone, stop, start career at Arsenal the youngster, who joined the Gunners at the age of nine, took a long, hard look at himself and discovered that a change had to be made. Of course Wilshere enjoyed a commendably successful career at Arsenal but by the player's own admission things had become stale and static. Wilshere's boyhood club West Ham were waiting in the wings.

Wilshere has that priceless ability to roll his body forward in an almost complete rotation before surging his way past the half way line, ball closely tied to his feet, before an extension of both feet enables him to thrust his way past defenders. Then in a blink of an eyelid, Wilshere looks for that dazzling sequence of wall passes that open up opposition defences. The low centre of gravity gives him a jet propelled explosion of pace that leaves defenders gasping at thin air.

Then before the West Ham fans could break into another stirring rendition of the club's anthem 'Bubbles' it was to time to drop your cup of tea and gasp with astonishment. The rumours had become more or less constant and eventually speculation became reality when Felipe Anderson, a Brazilian winger, who had hitherto been plying his trade at Italian club Lazio, could hardly wait to pull on a claret and blue shirt as West Ham's second signing of the season.

When Anderson declared that he was proud to be associated with the club that had given the world the legendary Bobby Moore, the equally as fabled Carlos Tevez and the much loved Paolo Di Canio, you found yourself quivering with disbelief. Had Anderson really plastered the likes of Harry Redknapp, Johnny Sissons, Jimmy Neighbour, Mark Ward and Bobby Barnes on his bedroom wall as a child.

The wing wizards of West Ham's yesteryear had once again come to full and vibrant life and maybe new manager Manuel Pellegrini  may want to cast his mind back to the days when Ron Greenwood and John Lyall were passing their worldly expertise onto players who were similarly receptive to their original thinking. Pellegrini has something of Greenwood and Lyall's mindset, men of gentle modesty but forward thinking theories.

But Anderson becomes one of West Ham's marquee's signings, a player with a lightning turn of pace and speed off the mark, a winger of breathtaking propulsion and power, cutting in from the flank with magnificent bursts into opposition's half and making the most of his natural talent. In the pre season friendly against Aston Villa Anderson seemed to swerve in from the touchline and feed the most perfectly weighted ball into the path of Arthur Masuaku who raced down the flank before clipping the ball across for Marko Arnautovic to slide in another West Ham goal in a 3-1 victory.

Literally days later West Ham had another winger to savour but one rather less acclaimed than Anderson. Andriy Yarmolenko, a Ukrainian flankman, arrived at West Ham while West Ham were about to start their pre- season preparations amid the stunning mountain ranges of Austria. It is hard to judge either Anderson or Yarmolenko before a ball has been kicked. But these are just four of the fresh faced recruits to adorn the London Stadium turf and some of us are quietly confident about the forthcoming season.

West Ham begin their season at Anfield on Sunday with perhaps the most thankless assignment. Although beaten in the Champions League Final by Real Madrid, Liverpool will want to start their season on the highest of notes. With Fabian Balbuena, Portuguese forward Xande Silva, Lucas Perez from Arsenal, experienced goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski and Issa Diop as another central defensive reinforcement, the base, spine and heartbeat of this newly refurbished West Ham side may take a number of the more hardened critics of their football by complete surprise.

But the caveats are well and truly in evidence. Some of us have been following West Ham for much longer than seems possible and we have been there through both thick and thin. For well over 40 years we have closed our eyes, buried our heads, leapt up into the air with almost unreasonable exultation and then just sighed with despairing exasperation. From early August and the autumnal mists to the blossoming flower of spring, this is one long, difficult road to somewhere without establishing how or why.

Still I'm ready and millions of football supporters in both the Premier League, Championship, League Ones and Two will drive down a thousand motorways, stopping off at a thousand service stations and then travelling all over the country just to see their Roy of the Rovers heroes. These are the loyal ones, the hardcore followers, the devoted enthusiasts, the supporters who worship at the  shrine of a thousand football grounds in all weathers, spending vast sums of money on both programmes, souvenirs and refreshments. They do this because they are besotted with the Beautiful Game, charmed by its deeply ingrained sense of tradition, its glorious history and its head spinning continuities.

Tomorrow morning, whole families with their starry eyed children, uncles, aunties, cousins, brothers and sisters will be heading towards their favourite teams football grounds wearing the distinctive and defining colours, emblems and badges on their teams shirt. They will spend small fortunes on souvenirs, cups, mugs, scarves, the new sponsors of the club, barely able to control their understandable excitement.

And then they will reach their teams ground, startling examples of modern ground architecture, huge 60,000 stadiums that look more and more like Roman amphitheatres with their multi - tiered seating arrangements. They will buy their pre match teas, coffees, cappuccinos and lattes with perhaps a well cooked meat and potato pie for good measure. It will be extortionately expensive because that's the game as we know it today.

Sadly, football completely lost its innocence when Trevor Francis became the first million pound English footballer when he signed for Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest several decades ago. And of course there was the outrageous £100 a week offered to Fulham's Johnny Haynes during the 1960s.

By complete contrast today's generation of footballers are cared for, protected, ludicrously pampered and totally spoilt. They earn many hundreds and thousands of pounds a week, are worth obscenely criminal millions on the open market and drive the kind of cars that only millionaires can possibly afford. And then football asks itself why it continues to be regarded with much the same suspicion as a first time gambler at a Monte Carlo casino where fortunes are won and then lost with the spin of a wheel.

Where will it ever end? When Neymar signed for Paris St German for roughly £200 million we hung our heads in shame and privately apologised for what we had witnessed. It was the investment of a lifetime but you began to image what exactly must have been going through the minds of those who work in the  money markets of the world where high flying financiers compete with belt and braces City stockbrokers.

For now though football in Britain will resume its competitive rivalries, its local animosities and occasionally bloodthirsty hostilities. Sometimes it may get unnecessarily personal and spite will meet head on with malice. But we wouldn't have it any other way. We love its delicious improbabilities, its mouth watering unpredictabilities, the sense of a level playing field on the first day and then the fairy tale romance that was Leicester City who won the Premier League, two seasons ago, if only because sometimes dreams do come true.

So hold on tight everybody the Premier League will be coming to a Freeview TV channel near to you, a lovely radio that paints a multitude of word pictures and a Tablet next to your sofa. From early August to early May of next year, relegation and promotion issues will become the overwhelming concern on our minds apart from the bills that have to be paid. For some football is an addiction and others a religion but then again such cliches have become the accepted norm. Welcome back football. It's so good to have you back where you belong.