You are spoiled beyond belief. Just 20 years ago, the most you’d have seen of club football at home were highlights fronted by Archie Macpherson or Des Lynam’s moustache, with the occasional live league fixture thrown in. Even if Sky Sports likes to pretend football came into being with the birth of the English Premier League in 1992, it changed the way we watch football forever.

Now, the true football fanatic has the chance to watch dozens of games covering half the world in one weekend. You can go online and devour bloggers’ tactical analysis and video of the latest in outrageous Brazilian tricks. Then you enter the crack den of live streams: illegal, addictive and sometimes just mystifying, one page of links can be the gateway to total rejection of family and friends in favour of a 2am high from the Copa Libertadores.

Even in today’s globalised football world, it's safe to say that the Russian First Division isn't a divison that broadcasters across the world have been fighting over. The new 2011 season is the first time it's even been televised in Russia, despite feeding one of the world's richest leagues. Five games in and the experiment seems to be working, to judge by an ecstatic reception across fan sites. It gives football fans and the provinces - both often taken for granted by the Russian elites - something to cheer about.

But this forgotten league’s new TV exposure also offers a salutary lesson: even in a footballing age saturated with YouTube clips set to dreadful Eurodance, it's perfectly possible for a player to shine and never be seen. Take Dimitrii Akimov. A hat-trick two weeks ago took him to 114 goals in 170 appearances for perennial division-swappers Sibir Novosibirsk (think a Russian version of Falkirk, right down to the 19th century architecture). Unfortunately, the TV cameras were off covering a scrappy mess in Voronezh (Russia’s Greenock – let that thought sink in), and the league didn't send anyone to get footage for its clip show.

Akimov is a ghost on video sites, despite spending most of his career at a team among the top 20 in a league system Uefa ranks Europe’s ninth best. He has a reputation as a powerful, even English-style forward, but there's no way to see for yourself. An exhaustive search turns up just two clips of him scoring, with no trace of his 34-goal club record haul from just four years ago.

Closer to home, the prime cuts available to fans are hurting teams all the way up to the SPL, as smaller sides limp on financially and even the big boys see attendances slide. From Russia’s Falkirk to the home of the Bairns, it’s all too easy to fall through the cracks.

Just once or twice, it might be worth turning away from the televised riches. There’s something appealing about a club’s existence being supported, quite literally, by the crowds in the stands, rather than multi-national sponsorship money. You might even surprise yourself – there are quite a few Dimitrii Akimovs out there.