WHILE all the excited talk this week has been of City's promotion challenge, I've also been musing on the more downbeat subject of Football League status and relegation to the non-league ranks.

For some 14 years — from late 1994 to last May's Wembley glory — the attention of Exeter City supporters was focused on either clinging on to or winning back our place as a Football League club.

Such was our number of close calls, demotion to the Conference was inevitable.

And, no matter how enthusiastically we all embrace the notion that we're a club going forwards now, it's equally inevitable that Exeter City will again finish in the bottom two of League Two.

That sorry day may be in five years, 15 years or 50 years.

But our history, East Devon's demographics, the performance of similarly sized clubs and the laws of probability all suggest there's nothing much we can do to remove the threat of one bad season sending us back to the land of Woking.

I guess that's just a threat that we — and this season Luton, Grimsby, Bournemouth et al — have to live with. But why?

What is the logic behind expelling a century-old football club from the Football League and removing funding for its youth development activity as punishment for one poor season on the pitch?

And, equally, what is the logic for automatically welcoming into the Football League any club which has bought itself a team capable of winning the Blue Square Premier or its play-offs, no matter how poorly supported, how limited its youth policy or how tiny a geographical area it purports to represent?

Since it was established in 1988, the process of automatically relegating first one and then two clubs from the Football League has achieved little of note, but has brought untold pain to former League clubs who've found themselves chucked into non-league football.

It's also hardly helped dozens of previously amateur sides who've been encouraged to risk everything in a bid for Football League status and have collapsed as a result.

After 21 years of this system, only two previously non-league sides play above League Two — and both Yeovil Town and Cheltenham Town are currently occupying League One's relegation positions.

Both average fewer supporters than Exeter, although at least they have clearly defined regions to call their own.

Wycombe are a third minor success story, being well-supported, moderately successful on the pitch and again having a county to call their own.

But the rest — Dagenham, Morecambe, Macclesfield, Accrington and Barnet — are adding little to the league.

They're five of the six worst-supported clubs in the country and only Morecambe (30 miles from Blackpool) could claim to be serving an area that would otherwise be deprived of league football.

Of course, it's too late now to shut the trapdoor and recreate the days of a closed shop of 92 clubs.

There are important former league clubs like Cambridge, Torquay, Oxford, Wrexham, Mansfield and York — all of whom represent either a county or a decent sized region — languishing in the Blue Square Premier.

You won't be surprised to hear that, although well adrift of champions-elect Burton, this desperate half dozen are the six best-supported sides in that division.

Yes, I admit to having an attendance obsession, but when measuring the importance of a professional football club, attendances to my cider and stats-addled brain matter more than anything.

Professional football is about communities coming together year after year after year to support their club, and the policy of judging a club's fitness to be in the Football League solely on the previous year's on-pitch performance is misguided.

One solution would be to expand the league to around 120 clubs with a little restructuring and the introduction of a fifth division.

It might seem unthinkable, but surely the Football League should take the opportunity, as it did in the early 1920s, to expand to include more of the nation's professional clubs.

This would benefit 'proper' non-league football too by returning competitions like the FA Trophy and what was the Conference to amateur and semi-pro sides.

All this may just be the fretting of a terrified Exeter fan who's haunted even at this time of great excitement by the thought of a second, and somehow even more miserable, relegation from the Football League.

But surely I'm not alone in thinking that Football League clubs, and towns which are greatly diminished without their club, deserve a more certain future than the present cruel system affords.