It strikes me there’s one relatively simple question to answer at the council meeting on Tuesday. A new stadium will require a degree of social adjustment and disruption wherever it is, it will have an environmental impact and, of course, it needs to be financed. But these considerations aren’t unique to these plans at this location and many of them can be addressed in detail further down the line. The question, therefore, is not where the stadium should be, but whether football clubs can benefit society.

A lot of focus in planning is on environmental impact but the UN Sustainability Goals go further than that. There is a balance with social cohesion, economic sustainability, equality and social justice. In short, improving society in its broadest sense. Few could argue against them, but the biggest challenge is how to practically achieve those goals.

Strikes by rail workers, nurses, teachers and other public sector workers is partly about pay, but it’s ultimately about inequality. A society in which there are billionaires avoiding tax and people using food banks is going to create disruption and challenge the cohesiveness of society. 

At the Kassam I’ve seen world leading surgeons, TV personalities, pensioners, students, regular working folk and kids all in the same place for a common purpose. There are people who work in the public sector, private sector and charity sector. Rich, poor, young, old, male, female, black and white.

When a child wears a replica shirt, it is perhaps their first connection with a broader community outside their family. It instils values around teamwork, camaraderie, commitment and physical and mental health. The success of women’s football promotes a value of gender equality, this is extending to the older generation through walking football and can reach into disability sport. It’s hard to imagine another social vehicle which can achieve that.

The work of Marcus Rashford and Jordan Henderson promoting social causes show that football can have an impact far beyond what happens on the pitch. The collective fervour around big national games heals wounds caused by divisive debate about Brexit or ‘wokeism’.

Football clubs offer a common language and experience that binds generations together. My dad introduced me to Oxford and, as he becomes increasingly unwell, it is one of the few topics that sustains us beyond conversations about logistics of attending hospital appointments. I’ve passed that onto my daughter; both her grandfather’s will phone her up after a game to see how it went. No doubt it’ll be passed onto future generations; if there’s a club to support.

These are the threads that bind society together, that help us recognise that people who are not like us are, ultimately, still people. And by extension, it promotes a willingness to respect them, help and fight for them. There are lots of people who are socially, economically and politically different to me, if they’re wearing a yellow and blue scarf, those things become less relevant. There are many positive activities that offer fragments of these things – community groups, clubs, campaigns – but none can offer such a holistic solution as a football club.

You don’t need to like football or even the club to see the opportunity that it offers, if it doesn’t exist, then none of the benefits exist. Swindon Town are our biggest rivals, but if they didn’t exist, the rivalry doesn’t exist, the shared experiences of winning and losing don’t exist, the stories of those games don’t exist, the conversations between past and present fans don’t exist, the cohesion doesn’t exist. On that basis, we need our most loved and least loved clubs to exist.

I regularly tell people I don’t go to football for the wins, if we did, we’d demand our money back after every defeat. There’s no product or service which you willingly buy (and re-buy) accepting that it might make you miserable. This is not transactional relationship; it is much deeper than that. Without forcing it down anyone’s throat, football clubs can tap into people’s psyches, I don’t know why, but they do. If they can promote good values – and we are a club that do that – then you’re instilling those values across a huge range of society and from that, society becomes less divided, more cohesive, healthier, happier, more prosperous, and more sustainable. 

This is not just a discussion about a football club wanting to play at a higher level and make more money, it is not about protecting a 130 year old institution. When it comes to thinking about a football club’s new stadium, it’s not a decision about its location, but about its worth. Politicians, especially at local level, from across party divides are typically concerned with improving society and improving lives. It is exceptionally hard to do that but if they want an easy win, then helping to keep your football club alive will help deliver those benefits long into the future.