There you have it, one cup of tea, a bastion of Britishness and a price difference of £2 - from 50p in Scotland to £2.50 at Old Trafford and the Etihad. But why?

And that, very simply, is what the BBC Price of Football 2012 report - to be published on the BBC Sport website on Thursday and discussed on BBC Radio 5 live - is all about. Asking why? Discussing how?

It isn't an exercise in kicking clubs for charging too much, nor is it about hopping on the bandwagon and shouting "disgrace" at that those that charge the most. It's about a day of discussion and debate about the cost of watching your team play football and how that has changed, at whatever level.

It's also the chance to ask questions of the people in the game who set the prices at the 166 teams involved across 10 divisions in England, Scotland and Wales.

But this didn't happen overnight. Before we even started, earlier in the year, we ensured we had the co-operation of the Premier League and the Football League. Clubs receive several requests a week to take part in surveys and reveal prices, so ensuring the leagues understood what we wanted to achieve was crucial.

Because of their experience of the Price of Football report in 2011, they agreed. They, in turn, encouraged clubs to take part.

Over the past month, we've spoken to media officers from every one of the 166 clubs we surveyed. Many of them more than once. Some, we've had to chase for the information. We've then double-checked that information to ensure that it's accurate.

But studying the Price of Football isn't easy. There is simply no way to compare the "normal" ticket prices fans pay at any given club, on any given matchday or for the deals available on season tickets.

From the variety of categories that are set depending on the opposition, to early bird offers, to family discounts through offers for cup games, there is no way to compare every single type of ticket available.

Similarly, neither is there such a thing as a standard junior ticket. Some clubs let certain ages in for free, others bracket children's tickets depending on age, setting one price for those under 12 and another for 12-16 for example.

So the simplest way to identify trends across 166 clubs in 10 divisions, who all use a range of different pricing structures, is to keep it clean and simple to ensure that the results of the study are as comparable as they can be.

We asked clubs for the cheapest, and most expensive, adult ticket for a league game when purchased on a match day, as well as adult season tickets - and added in a pie, tea and a programme to work out the cost of a day at the football for one adult.

We've aimed, all along, to be as transparent as possible. Clubs decided to take part in the survey and they wanted to spark debate on their own websites with their own fans about how their prices are structured.

With seven different price categories across 166 teams, our study offers more than 1,100 different figures to pore over and is one of the biggest ever undertaken in British football.

We want this to be an annual event, when football clubs and fans come together across the BBC to discuss and debate everything from the price of a pie, to the cost of a season ticket.

So next year, we'll do it again, and I welcome your suggestions about how we can make it even better. Feel free to leave some below.

After all, what is football without the fans?

By Stuart Rowson, BBC sports editor interactive.

Listen, watch and debate the Price of Football with 5 live and the BBC Sport website with a specially-extended YourCall from 9-11am on Thursday with Nicky Campbell and Rachel Burden. You can listen on 5 live and watch it on red button and the website between 9-10, then online and red button only between 10-11. And you can get involved in the debate throughout the day on the BBC Sport website on Sportsday Live from 7am and on Twitter using #bbcpriceoffootball

One of the things we said we would stop doing is our daily on-demand sports news video bulletin.

Today will be the last day of the bulletin, and you may have noticed we have removed the link from the banner of our website.

As we explained at the time, video is key for us but we know the bulk of traffic goes to on-demand clips around stories and streams of live events.

So that's where we will focus our efforts, rather than on a 'linear' bulletin of headlines.

You can find out more about our weekly schedule of live events here and what's coming up on the BBC red button generally here.

Not surprisingly, given they've cut their prices by 25%, Preston couldn't wait to talk about how they put their fans first.

Oxford United's caterers - no need to re-read - sent out a full-page statement warning of the dangers of talking about "headline prices" of a cuppa and a pie - you might want to re-read that - because they didn't take into account quality or portion size. I jest not.

When you survey tickets prices of football clubs, you don't so much open a can of worms, as morph them into anxious, PR-conscious prairie dogs, looking over their shoulders at the rest and eyeing the sky for journalists and fans ready to pounce on anyone caught in the noon sun.

But is it that bad? I mean, really?

That football is expensive is relative. Head to Iron Maiden (remember them) at the Manchester Evening News Arena recently, and the cheapest price was £43. At Old Trafford and the Etihad Stadium this season - to watch the Premier League champions and the world's richest club - it could cost you as little as £28 or £25.

Even at Arsenal where the most expensive ticket will cost you £100 - just 1% of tickets available - they hardly struggle to sell seats. More than 60,000 turned out at the Emirates Stadium last weekend to see a pre-season friendly against Boca Juniors. It'll be the same when the season kicks off for real next weekend.

A portion of fish and chips at Trent Bridge for a county match will cost £5.95

Clubs compete in regional, as well as divisional, marketplaces, where the economic trends of the area play as big a part as the football on the pitch. So it's not overly surprising that the likes of Preston, Rochdale, Blackburn, Bolton and Wigan compete against each other for the casual fans.

The same applies for Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea. Metropolitan London with a greater potential fanbase of affluence and disposable income, compared to the north west - smaller fanbase, lower wages. Not rocket science really.

So different prices for different levels of football is understandable, yet almost every club sticks with the £3 - or thereabouts - guideline for programmes.

Yet when it comes to a cuppa, (only tea bag, hot water and milk last time I checked) prices vary from 50p at Crawley to £2.20 at the same Blackburn club who offer the cheapest day out in the Premier League. Presumably, just about the same tea, but with a different environ and a captive audience. Market forces.

Two weeks ago I went to a Lancashire T20 game at Old Trafford, and bought my son and I cheeseburger and chips. The price? £11. But I did what we all do. I raised my eyebrows, muttered about yesteryear, looked at his expectant face and then paid up. He didn't even eat it, but that's not the point, and I'm not bitter.

What is the point, is that I paid at all. And that was my choice. Of course it was expensive, but going to sport is just that.

When I was young I moaned about the price of football as I watched Grimsby Town get promoted out of the old fourth division. More than 20 years on, we're having the same conversations. Yet we're still paying. No-one makes us.

This weekend, as the Football League gets under way, about 350,000 people will be at the games amid the backdrop of one the country's most difficult financial periods since the Second World War.

No-one will force anyone to make sacrifices to watch football. Yet they will - the only question is whether clubs are treading the fine line between providing value for money, or are profiteering from passion and dedication.

By Stuart Rowson, BBC Sport website editor

Sportsday Live is our rolling sports news service aimed at bringing you the best news and highlights as they happen, as well as providing you with links to read or watch more. We'll also capture the conversation that exists around sport.

The aim? Simple. To provide one place for sports fans to get - at-a-glance - the best of the day's news and views from right across the BBC.

From all that's great right here on the BBC Sport website, to 5live, the World Service, the News Channel, and from Match of the Day to Radio Humberside, we'll take the highlights from what's happening and report them in short, bite-size chunks.

But it won't just be about the BBC. We'll monitor other media, too, because there's a whole host of great journalism and stories out there that you need to know about.

So we'll go and find them and present the best of them in Sportsday Live, giving you the web link to enable you to read more yourself. Because, although we're fiercely proud of what we do at BBC Sport, this service is about helping you find what you want.

We only hope that, when you've finished reading the articles and watching the video we send you to, you come back to us for more. If you do, there will be plenty to keep you ticking over with the BBC, even if it means we send you away again via another link.

And it will be about more than simply bringing you the news. We will have selected highlights and the running conversation around the big moments and talking points from the sportsmen and women, clubs, organisations, journalists, BBC pundits and reporters on Twitter. So if you're not part of the Twittosphere, we'll do the hard work for you.

But if you're one of the millions of the Twitterati (is that a word?), you can follow our list at http://twitter.com/#!/list/BBCSport/the-sport-and-bbc-list

There are more than 300 Tweeters on there. We've tried to pick out the best sports-related ones but we don't think for a moment we've got everyone. If you've got a name, club or organisation we've missed, then share it with us via @shamoonhafez. We'll be adding more as we go.

And we want to know what you think of our new service. We want to provide a single place for you to find your sports news - but that doesn't mean it will be perfect.

So if you've got suggestions about how we can make it better, or if just want to shake an angry metaphorical stick at someone, then leave a comment below, or follow me on Twitter @stuartrowson

The warning comes from the staging of the Olympics in Athens in 2004. No-one knows for sure how much the Games cost Greece. The official figure is £9.6bn but SotirisTriantafyllou, one of Greece's most experienced sports journalists, says that the "real" figure is a "mystery". All he can say for sure is that the official estimate is "not true... it's two or three times that amount".

Rarely, if ever, do Olympic Games make money for their hosts. But the Greeks' profligacy was perhaps without precedent.

The man charged with clearing up the mess is Yiorgos Panayiotou, chairman and CEO of the state-owned Olympic Properties Company.

He is politely, but forensically withering: "Our view, albeit in retrospect, is that some of these facilities ought not to have been permanent. Nobody plays softball in Greece. Hardly anyone plays hockey in Greece. You don't need a permanent baseball pitch in Greece."

Mr Panayiotou only took charge in the middle of last year. He is now trying to draw the poison from endless legal tangles over how the Olympic venues might be redeveloped by private companies, and from the cost in the mean time of maintaining sites which he says, after the Games, were "almost left to nature".

He says that future Olympic hosts should learn from Athens' hamfistedness. One lesson is to ensure that whatever you build has the sturdiest legal, planning and environmental framework, to allow you to dispose of it as you see fit. Another, he delivers with a roar of laughter: "If someone tells you, 'I can set up this structure for you - as a light and temporary structure - and instead of fifty million (for a permanent venue), pay me twenty-five million'... you should not send him away."

On that, the organisers of the London Games may be able to point, proudly, to the temporary, 12,000-seat basketball and handball arena, in the Olympic Park. This striking, fluffy marquee will be dismantled after the Games.

But nearby, lies a much bigger venue, whose future is shortly to be decided, and whose fate will be controversial and costly.

The Olympic Park Legacy Company has already, under pressure, postponed its recommendation on whether the main stadium should be given to the Premier League club, Tottenham Hotspur, which has said it will rip out the athletics track, or to West Ham United, which has said it will keep the track.

On this, too, Athens has something to say. The main Olympic stadium, was not purpose-built for the Games in 2004. But it was renovated at some expense. It now rents itself out to two of Greece's biggest football teams, Panathanaikos, and AEK. Both teams, however, are keen to move out, and build their own, new stadiums.

The reason, according to Grigoris Kanarelis, general secretary of the main Panathanaikos fan club, is simple. Mr Kanarelis is speaking, tie loosened, cigarette lit, in the city centre offices of the fan club, the walls painted the pounding green of the team strip.

"The supporters aren't near the players," he explains. "It's not a stadium for football. It's a stadium for Olympic Games. You don't feel the mood of the game."

Empty stadiums are difficult to judge. But when I visited the Olympic stadium on a rain-lashed winter night, even from the front row, the football pitch did seem coldly distant, separated as it was by a nine-lane athletics track. Mr Kanarelis says the lesson for Spurs or West Ham is clear: "Get rid of the athletics track. Otherwise it's a crime. Nothing else."

The problem for the Olympic Stadium is that it relies heavily on the income generated by the two football clubs.

One former senior stadium official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the BBC that the venue costs about €35m a year to run. Its income, which only amounts to about €9m or €10m a year, comes mainly from Panathanaikos and AEK - in rent and a 15% commission on ticket sales. A small proportion comes from the stadium's other events, such as concerts and conferences. The government currently covers the shortfall. But to lose the football tenants would hurt, deeply.

As with London, a great dumper-truck of money was poured into the Athens project, not just into the venues, but also the local transport.The city saw new roads, metro stations and tram lines built.

On the day I was there, I watched five trams swish past along the beach-side route which had been created for 2004. There was not a single passenger on board.

Petros Ferentions, the manager of the local branch of the Flocafé chain, said it had not been worth it. Yes, he said, business - which had collapsed for everyone in the past year - would definitely be worse if there were not a tram to help bring customers.

"But in general people don't use the tram as much as it was expected. I don't believe the state nor the citizens have profited," he said.

The good news for London is that it is unlikely to repeat all of the mistakes in Athens. The organisation has so far been better, the British economy appears not to be quite so hammered, and history, in any case, rarely offers perfect symmetry. But such is the vastness of the expenditure demanded by the high priests of the International Olympic Committee, that the traps abound. And as Athens still bears witness, once you are ensnared, it can take a long time to emerge.

BBC World Service is already gripped by World Cup fever. We've been working on our own approach to broadcasting the matches, which launched with the opening match in South Africa. We're calling it the match stats module and you can see it in action on World Cup Team Talk.

Working for World Service Future Media involves a set of challenges with everything we develop and this one was no different. Everything we do must translate into a universal user experience in order to be relevant to the users of the 32 language services we support.

For the World Cup we do not have the rights (like BBC Sport) to broadcast live audio or video streams. What we have instead is the Press Association data feeds (more on these later). We are also aware that for many of our international audiences the BBC may not be their first port of call for World Cup action. We knew we'd need to offer something different.

One thing to remember about the World Cup is that people who take an interest don't necessarily follow football all year round. We wanted to create something that appealed to casual and keen fans alike.

The second design divorced the look from all things football to create a more abstract information graphic, marking the key events on a game clock. This iteration was discounted because it became too complex as a representation of the events:

In the end we decided to combine the two previous ideas: using the football pitch in the visual because it quite obviously shows this is about football and is something understood by speakers of all languages; and the timeline, because seeing the events mapped over time is important for watching it unfold live:

The evolution of the design saw us take the approach of not showing all the detail in one view. Instead we show the most important information on the main screen and then have lineups and additional stats that you can click through to for the bigger football fans. We opted to keep all the player names in Latin script both because translating over 600 player names would be impractical and because fans of all nations will be used to seeing them written like this on the backs of shirts during the tournament.

To keep the design universal we stripped out text (leaving it for rollover) and used symbols for events on the match clock. Yellow and red cards were obvious and there is a convention for using a football to represent a goal but substitutions were the hardest to get right in a small space. A spot of user testing amongst a few different nationalities showed two triangles as the best understood. A few more fun details to embrace the visual language of football were added along the way such as an electronic scoreboard and kits of the teams playing.

Probably the biggest technical challenge was the use of the feeds. These feeds are designed for live match commentary and match updates (scores and table positions) on the BBC Sport site. World Service requirements and our audience are very different - it took some trial and error. In the end a combination of two different feeds were used to create the match module that could accurately map an entire match visually and work across a range of sites.

Integrating the feeds within Flash wasn't so difficult, but the nuances of football soon caused some interesting technical and design issues. The value of 'domain knowledge' really cannot be understated here. If we both hadn't been keen football fans there could've been far more problems with the project. Advance knowledge of scenarios such as added injury time, extra time and penalty shoot outs was invaluable during the development of the module - these situations were the trickiest to deal with.

Luckily we started developing the module towards the end of the football season - so we had a plethora of Premier League, Championship, Europa League and Champions League feeds to test with. The testing process was incredibly high tech - it involved sitting at home in the evening hitting refresh and saving feeds at certain parts of the game when something went awry so it could be debugged the next day.

The highlight of the testing process was undoubtedly with home internet down, a pub with wi-fi was required to capture feeds on the night of the Europa League final and the Championship play-offs. Both games went into extra-time and it was great seeing the module kick into extra time mode with no problems - and Cardiff and Leicester did us even more favours by going to penalties:

With the Leagues and Cups decided, the pre-World Cup friendlies gave some more testing opportunities. Fabio Capello broke the module well and truly when he made five substitutions at the same time against Japan. But we fixed that, and though it's unlikely to occur in the World Cup, we now have it covered.

To finish here's the module for that Cardiff v Leicester game working in four very different scripts (Chinese traditional, Russian, Bengali, Arabic):

James Offer and Matt Isherwood are Designers, BBC World Service Future Media.

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We are in the process of making some major improvements to the BBC News website.

These changes will roll-out over the next few months and include a redesign of the site and a re-engineering of the supporting technical systems. We'll be sharing the details on these changes in this blog in the coming weeks.

The first set of changes we are making will see us upgrading the News Website story HTML to use CSS layout instead of table-based layout. The appearance will be the same. The new HTML will be lighter-weight and more accessible. At the same time we will cease to publish the low graphics version of both the News and Sport websites. These versions are scheduled to be switched off on 6 April.

The reason to close the low graphics is not simply based on the percentage of users but because we are making a wider set of improvements that meet most of the needs of people currently using this version.

We know that there are some users who are accessing the site on slow connections or via a mobile device. For those users we are providing a clearer link to the mobile version of the site. This site shares many of the characteristics of the low graphics site in that the pages are simplified and have a much lower page weight than the full web site.

As Erik Huggers, Director of Future Media and Technology recently explained, we are also working on improving our range of mobile services beginning with an application for the iPhone followed by services for other platforms.

For users of the Sports site, using the mobile version has the additional benefit in that it provides a much richer service around live coverage and statistics than the current low graphics site.

We know that another major reason why people use the low graphics version is that it is simpler to read. For people with reading difficulties this is very important. The mobile site alternative we will now be offering provides a similarly simplified presentation.

And as mentioned above, at the same time that we are turning off low graphics, we will be upgrading the HTML of News story pages to a much improved CSS layout. The News front page and other section pages will be following soon after alongside a redesign of their layout and the Sport site will be similarly updated later this year.

This summer, we are also expecting to roll out a suite of accessibility tools. These are designed to provide much better support to a range of users - especially those with Lo-vision, Asperger's, Dyslexia, ADHD, or those who find text hard to read. For those who have been using low graphics as a more accessible version, these new tools will provide a much better service. You can find out more about it over on the Ouch website.

We're also aware that some enterprising developers have built services off the low graphics output. For people interested in building on our content, visit BBC Backstage for more information on BBC feeds and APIs.

What about old content?
When we make this change, all previously published low graphics will no longer be available. We will be applying a redirect on all low graphics URLs to point at the full site alternative. This is the best way of ensuring that the content context of the link is preserved.

At the same time as these changes we are also switching off our legacy PDA site and Avantgo services. These predate our browser mobile service and the URLs for those services will be redirected to the mobile site.

Anthony Sullivan is Executive product manager, BBC news website.

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