Olympics organisers may have pulled 500,000 football tickets from sale, but Frank Malley reckons British crowds will be comparatively healthy.

First things first. Football should not be in the Olympics.

Neither should tennis, nor should any other sport for whose competitors a gold medal is not the pinnacle of their careers.

Would Andy Murray rather have lifted the Wimbledon singles trophy to the skies this summer or have an Olympic gold medal dangle around his neck?

The answer is so obvious, it barely requires more consideration.

Would Team GB football captain Ryan Giggs swap a Champions League medal for Olympic football gold, despite his eulogy this week about "playing in the biggest sporting event in the world"?

It is doubtful.

Football has the World Cup and the European Championships and the Champions League and the Premier League, events which regularly draw in billions of viewers.

But none of that means we should beat the Olympic organisers with a big stick after they announced that 500,000 football tickets would be withdrawn because they could not be sold and capacities reduced at several Olympic venues.

Neither should we use the entire tiers of empty seats which will become apparent at Hampden Park and the Millennium Stadium over the next couple of weeks to conclude that the Olympic football tournament is an unmitigated aberration.

The fact is that British football watchers are a pretty clued-up and sophisticated bunch.

They will get behind Team GB and there has been a healthy take-up for Great Britain's matches.

But they will not be taken for a ride.

Egypt v Belarus in Glasgow? How was that ever going to pull the punters out of the pubs in Sauciehall Street and sell out Hampden Park?

Gabon? Honduras? Not exactly capable of drawing the crowds in Gabon or Honduras, let alone the United Kingdom.

Olympic football is not the World Cup. It does not promote excellence. It does not feature all the world's top players. It does not tap in to any of the razzmatazz which recently saw television rights for the Premier League sold for £3billion.

It is not about 'Faster, Higher, Stronger'. Essentially, it is a tournament for players under 23, many of whom are emerging and will not have registered on the radar of most fans, with the odd fading over-age star thrown in.

Some say that was a good reason for selecting David Beckham. Beckham could have shifted a huge chunk of those 500,000 tickets, couldn't he?

Well, actually, no.

Team GB v Uruguay at the Millennium Stadium on August 1 is a sell-out. So are all Great Britain's matches at Wembley, plus the men's quarter-finals, semi-finals and final at Wembley, as well the women's final, while the men's quarter-final and bronze medal matches in Cardiff are both close to being sell-outs.

Meanwhile, the first match at the Millennium - the women's clash between Team GB and New Zealand - has sold 33,000 tickets, which is almost 25,000 more than the maiden women's FA Cup final attracted in May when 8,723 spectators turned up to see Birmingham beat Chelsea on penalties at Bristol's Ashton Gate.

Of course, it would be wonderful if there was a bum on every seat at the London Olympics. But this is one time we should listen to the suits and the bean counters who tell us more than 1.6million tickets have been sold already for the Olympic football, more than for any other sport and more than the recent European Championships in Poland and Ukraine.

That compares with actual overall football attendances in Atlanta 1996 of 1.35million, Sydney 2000 1.075m, Athens 2004 0.43m and Beijing 2008 2.1m.

Beat the organisers over the head on security and transport and legacy and even the dreadful weather if you like, but the amount of football seats which will be full is not too shabby for a sport which should not be anywhere near the Olympics.

Frank Malley, Press Association Sport