It used to be that there was a line between the celebrity – or an institution – and the fan. Journalists would be the go-betweens. Long-form interviews in Sunday morning newspapers gave you a glimpse of your hero, or a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of a sports team.

It’s never been harder to get access to Premier League footballers and other sportspeople as it is now. The dynamic has shifted in the way that people find out about their idols, or the sportspeople they’re interested in. News often comes in the guise of short-form viral video clips, tweets, or news stories that barely make it over 200 words. If you want behind-the-scenes information about a football club, you’ll probably see it on the club’s own website.

It is safer to employ content creators who can produce videos and articles for fans than to allow journalists into the club to cover it instead. Clubs make their own and post on social media where everyone can see it, so there’s never really a need for a third party.

Journalists get squeezed out because people can get their news and views directly from the club. It feels smoother and more authentic, straight from the horse’s mouth and from a source you can trust.

But as smooth and polished as club-produced content can be, it will never make the cardinal mistake of criticising the club or its players. Which is fair enough, really. No one expects a club to criticise its players. It would be like criticising your children.

Above is Manchester City’s Facebook Live stream of reaction to their defeat to Chelsea, recently. Again, you wouldn’t expect it to be anything other than positive: celebratory in victory, commiseratory in defeat. There’s no doubt that it’s great content produced by the club for its own fans, and as such you wouldn’t necessarily even want balance. City fans had just suffered a bitter defeat, they don’t want to hear about how bad their players were.

In fairness to City, there is a certain balance to the clip above, at least one opinion was shared about the fact that Sergio Aguero was sent off for a bad tackle, and another opinion stated the opposite. But there is a broader worry about this sort of club-sanctioned reaction show, and that’s that it can easily become a propaganda tool. And who wants to tune into a Facebook live stream run like Pravda?

There will, of course, be others who provide a more balanced reaction. You can read match reports and reaction in newspapers and online, you can read blogs and search out independent opinion, you can even find others doing Facebook live streams, or even on the new Periscope-fuelled Twitter live video. Anyone with anything to say can produce a live stream to the entire internet these days.

So we’re not at a tipping point just yet. But if clubs are the ones with the easiest access to their players, and if they’re the ones creating the content, and if, even when journalists do get access, the responses of the interviewees are sanitised and staid, then the slightly quirkier videos and interviews that clubs can produce will be more attractive to fans than what journalists do. Especially if journalists push agendas – there is always a lack of fairness, especially in printed sports opinion.

If that happens, then perhaps club channels will become more attractive for post-match reaction and opinion, too. And then they’re the ones with a monopoly on their players, and could have a large sway over the opinions of their audience as well.

It’s not yet that bad, and it probably never will be. References to Pravda are over the top given the current situation, and there’s nothing wrong with a club giving its fans great video content on Facebook. In fact, it would be terrible if they didn’t. Besides, even if football clubs did treat their social media accounts as the propaganda arm of a sinister institution, it still wouldn’t matter. Because firstly, it’s only sport; and secondly, people could still choose to go back to getting their news and views from journalists again if they wanted to.

But in a world where we get our news served up by social media algorithms and where a frightening percentage of the population never suffer the indignity of having their opinions challenged, maybe we should be more wary of reduced access to sportspeople and the fact that the content we do get often comes from clubs and sponsors instead of journalists.

There’s nothing wrong with clubs producing content and shedding a positive light on their club, for their fans and for the wider public. But we should definitely be worried about losing our access to balanced third party content in favour of polished club content.