LONDON—In a Thames-side corner of 115-year-old Craven Cottage, the quaintest football pitch on the planet, several hundred visiting fans of Manchester City are on their feet singing, fists rhythmically pumping the air.

Ya ya, ya-ya ya ya, ya-ya ya ya, ya-ya Yaya Touré.

As in City’s star midfielder, busy leading his team to a 2-1 victory over the home side, Fulham, owned by former Harrods pooh-bah (and father of the late Dodi) Mohamed Al Fayed.

This is stop two in a pilgrimage that will eventually see a couple of 50-somethings take in five English Premier League matches and one Champions League game in eight days — and make glaring what’s so terribly wrong with the way most North American sports teams treat their fans.

Stop one had been an Arsenal home loss to Chelsea.

It was a game neither side really deserved to win, played out in the luxuriously new Emirates Stadium.

But if the venue was more than a century removed from Craven Cottage, and the north London crowd twice the size, the dynamic in the stands was unchanged.

Arsenal fans used to serenade their then-captain with a variation on The Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” (Robin van Persie/He scores when he wants), so the visiting horde from Chelsea couldn’t resist reprising that melody with their own lyrics:

He left ’cause you’re s--t,

He left ’cause you’re s-----t,

Robin van Persie,

He left ’cause you’re s--t.

And so the week went, from shrine to shrine, with the vastly outnumbered visiting fans always trying to out-sing and out-cheer the home crowd, as if channelling Henry V at Agincourt.

To wit: the Gooners (as Arsenal fans are known) at West Ham United, lauding striker Olivier Giroud to the chorus of “Hey Jude”: Naa, na na na-na-na naaa, na-na-na naaa, G-i-roud.

Or West Ham followers taunting the relatively mute home fans of Queens Park Rangers, to the tune of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay”: Sounds like a library/Sounds like a library/Sounds like a. . .

Apart from music broadcast during the warm-up — often (and endearingly) “London Calling” by The Clash — no music is electronically pumped into the stadium during the game. There are no Jumbotron messages telling people when to cheer, no commercial breaks, and the amount of advertising signage barely registers compared with a North American venue.

The name of a player leaving the game and substituted for another is duly put over the PA system, but that’s it. The whole match is finished within two hours, and the people in the stands are completely in control of the atmosphere.

Arab sheiks and Russian oligarchs might own many of the teams, but the fans, unprompted by anything, still own the game experience. It’s up to them. They know it, act accordingly and, as amazing as it might seem to a North American, the leagues and teams of Europe also know this to be the case.

That’s the magic they and the team owners are buying into, not trying to manufacture.

This is an ocean away from, say, the typical NFL game, which consists of eight (8!) minutes of on-field action crammed into three hours, thankfully relieved by Mensan television commentary, prediction and biography, the spiritual delights of the huddle, the time out and the challenged call being reviewed by video replay, then a welcome commercial variation on the theme of beer.

What does this say about us as sports fans, or rather, what do North American teams, leagues and broadcasters think of us, as fans?

At a recent Toronto Argonauts game, played out at the SkyDome, a.k.a. the Rogers Centre, a.k.a. the absolute worst place on the planet to watch any sport, even the time out had a sponsor, and the Jumbotron carried this cringe-inducing message: “SSSSSHHHH The Offence is Preparing.”

When you think you have to tell people to cheer for the home-side defence and give the offence relative quiet, you’re assuming the found-ins are not fans but moronic neophytes.

The would-be supporters end up being treated like the studio audience of an American TV game show where some comely woman walks around with an instructive sign saying “Get Loud,” just in case you didn’t see the red light that says “Applause.”

Constantly assaulted by loud music, commercial breaks, truly weird non-athletic, on-field spectator competitions (build a “Baconator”?) and then sudden exhortations to be silent or to cheer (wow, there are T-shirts being propelled into the crowd with a gun), no wonder most people in the stadium opt for silence as their default position.

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We have been numbed, dumbed down and made somehow extraneous. We aren’t sports fans so much as witnesses, an audience for some perverse video game, all noise and visuals, in which you are told to “click here” at moments deemed desirable by the franchise’s management.

This stems from an inherent assumption about ownership, or rather the assumptions of ownership as interpreted/imagined/guessed at, by the league or team.

It’s as if, should you happen to be the proprietor of, say, the Toronto Maple Leafs, you don’t just own the team, but the sport as well. You, as owner, define the experience for the chumps who’ve emptied their pockets to watch a dreadful excuse for hockey — an otherwise beautiful, magic game corrupted by too many grasping suits.

But don’t think of expressing your disgust at the local version of the NHL where it counts. Don’t think of showing up at a Leafs game with something as honestly democratic as a placard that says: “Please, dear God, give us professional hockey.” That just won’t do. You are merely a spectator.

Toss a waffle at your peril.

The two most valuable teams on the planet are Manchester United and Real Madrid, and proper footballers are among the best-paid athletes anywhere. The transfer, or trade, period sees many hundreds of millions of dollars change hands across Europe.

There’s a reason the likes of Arsenal, also among the world’s dearest franchises, have stand-alone stores selling all manner of clothing and memorabilia in faraway Asia.

So, yes, it is about money. But there’s a difference.

During one of many trips yours truly made to Haiti after the earthquake, the rioting and protests stopped for a couple of hours — while everyone huddled around televisions to watch Barcelona play Real Madrid.

If you own a football team whose play can stop violence in one of the poorest countries on the planet, amid a cholera epidemic, then you own something special.

It’s not the banquet that you own, mind, but an important place at the table where mankind feasts.

The mega-rich who’ve snapped up English Premier League teams know they’ve bought valuable franchises.

But beyond the usual eccentricities — Al Fayed putting up an incongruous statue of Michael Jackson at Fulham, say — they also instinctively know something else.

They may own a team and a stadium, both of great and usually increasing value. But they realize they don’t — and can’t — own something far bigger and infinitely more valuable.

They don’t own the match. They don’t own the game.

The fans do.