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Spot the Daily Telegraph reporter Newcastle United have banned the newspaper over an article alleging a split in the dressing room.

Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA Riddle me this: why do football clubs ban journalists, when we have the most severe libel laws in the free world, through which they are positively encouraged to seek lucrative redress for stories that are damagingly inaccurate? The answer, depressingly, is because we in the media let them, judging an easy supply of words and pictures to be more important than freedom of speech.

Last week, Newcastle United banned the Daily Telegraph over an article it disagreed with, and the action prompted Channel 4 News’s chief correspondent Alex Thomson to write a marvellous blog on the issue.

Incensed by the latest piece of liberty-taking by those he deems the Tracksuit Tyrants, Thomson called out everyone from the clubs to the TV networks, to the FA to the press pack, to the Football Writers’ Association, for permitting this state of affairs.

Few are more perfectly placed to ask the question than Thomson a brilliant reporter who spends so much time reporting from actual wars caused by actual despots that his observations on football and free speech should have offered the most chastening of perspectives.

Alas, Rangers banned the BBC from Ibrox the next day, just as they have banished others in the past, and just as Sir Alex Ferguson has barred so many reporters and broadcasters down the years.

Since then, imagine my lack of surprise to hear word that Newcastle themselves have doubled down on their position, and imposed some sort of ban on the Sun.

Could such rumours be true? After speaking to Newcastle’s press office, I can confirm that a Sun reporter has indeed been banned for a particular article but not the Sun newspaper in its entirety, as was the case with the Telegraph.

If you’d like that apparent inconsistency explained, then I’m afraid you’re out of luck.

I was informed that any other inquiries or discussions on the matter would be entirely off the record, as though we were talking about the location of the Ark of the Covenant as opposed to a quick explanation of the club’s decision.

I can’t honestly remember if I’m even allowed to tell you which story the Sun hack was banned for, or what the rules are on my being allowed to even relay to you the nature of my own unanswered questions pertaining to bannings in general.

I think it’s probably safest to just assume that the second an inquiry leaves one’s lips during a conversation with anyone who works at a football club, it becomes the property of that football club, and even so much as hinting at it to outsiders effectively constitutes theft.

As for my temerity in even making the call to check well, I haven’t felt this impertinent since I asked the FA what David Beckham’s role was within the England camp during the 2010 World Cup, and was told by its sniffy press chief that it could only be explained “off the record”.

I suppose I could come up with a way to get around these draconian restrictions, just as broadcasters did by having Gerry Adams voiced by an actor for all those years.

Maybe I could disclose the tenor of my conversations with football club press officers via the medium of interpretative dance, or render them allegorically in pipecleaners.

In the end, though, I count myself lucky that my job mostly exists at several removes from them.

I am not dependent on the kindnesses of football’s institutions in order to write opinion.

I can’t imagine the whimsical chain of events that would ever see me invited to become a member of the Football Writers’ Association and I imagine the Football Writers’ Association feels that loss even less keenly than I do.

As far as the wider and more operational “football family” goes, however, it is amazing how highly valued the platitudes of a press conference are on both sides of the player-media divide.

Do recall the great Lads Done Well strike of 2004, in which the England side were so angered by coverage of David James that Beckham, the captain, refused to face the media after a World Cup qualifier in Poland, thus depriving viewers and readers of the selection of interchangeable clich’s and platitudes that bookend any big-time football fixture.

On an earlier occasion, the England side voted unanimously to strike over the FA’s treatment of Rio Ferdinand for his missed drugs test, though they ended up bottling that, just as the English and Scottish media bottle any attempt at principled solidarity in support of a banned colleague if, indeed, such action is ever discussed.

Amusingly, one football hack responded to Thomson’s blog by bridling that they jolly well did show solidarity with their banned colleagues because they furnished them with the quotes from the press conferences from which they were excluded.

Straight out of the Lech Walesa playbook, that one.

Still, that’s the football family for you a dysfunctional clan of bottlers, shoring each other up with ill-disguised contempt.

So attritional and corrosive has the relationship become that perhaps the biggest favour football clubs could do the public would be to ban all print and broadcast journalists from their temples.

There’d be far less football reporting, but what did emerge would be far more meaningful.

I imagine it wouldn’t be very long before the clubs were begging for normal, less troublesome service to resume.

Until then, it’s hard to escape an uncomfortable conclusion: that a seat at a press conference is invested with value beyond that of free speech.