According to a number of sources, football is going to struggle to capture the public's imagination when the new season kicks off next week because the country is too busy drooling over Olympians and marvelling at the sheer likeability of all these new sporting heroes whose names we were unfamiliar with until a few days ago.

Football is on the run already, in fact, since the Community Shield game between Manchester City and Chelsea on Sunday is having to be played at Villa Park due to Wembley being required for Olympic purposes. When the season proper starts, a week after that, it is already being suggested that without a Danny Boyle-orchestrated opening ceremony few people are going to notice. And if they do, it will be with a yawn that acknowledges the fortnight-long dream of perfection is over and the overpaid, under-performing brats are back.

This is an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Quite a few of the columnists paid to write about football for most of the year actually do so with a metaphorical peg on their nose, and can barely disguise their glee when something demonstrably superior comes along so that the national sport can be none too subtly rubbished by liberal use of phrases such as "true sportsmen", "real athletes" and "genuine glory".

This occurs every four years when the Olympics take place, but if, as has happened on the last two occasions, British athletes are covering themselves in the aforementioned glory, the process speeds up. And if Britain happens to be hosting the Olympics, and doing it conspicuously well from a participation and a presentation point of view, you very soon end up with the idea that we are now strolling in the Elysian fields of sport, or at least basking in its sunlit uplands from where the only possible direction is down.

There is no point arguing or getting upset about this. Being absolutely brilliant for a short space of time is the Olympics' unique selling point, both in terms of what athletes aspire to and what audiences come to expect. On the other hand you wouldn't want them much more often than once every four years. Very few of the Olympic disciplines make great spectator sports in their own right and the joy of measurement – someone always has to be the fastest, strongest, fittest etc – would not have audiences on the edge of their seats on a week in, week out basis.

That's where football comes in. Say what you like about the Premier League, but it does have people on the edge of their seats on a week-by-week basis and, whatever is at present being suggested, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A large part of the reason for that is because it is not about measurement, unless you count the size of Manchester City's bank balance or the height of Tony Pulis's back line at Stoke.

Football is less predictable than, say, Olympic track cycling or rowing, because Great Britain have been able to achieve success at these disciplines by throwing money and resources at them. Manchester City have spent many millions more in their quest for trophies, but they still ended up in that ridiculous dogfight with QPR on the last day of the season to win their first Premier League title.

There is nothing wrong with the way Britain has cornered success in rowing and cycling, though when you hear a rower saying he has been out on the river in training every single day for the last four years in preparation for his one race at the Olympics, you do wonder how many other countries in the world are able to compete at that level. Bearing in mind that over half the nations competing in the Olympics have never won a medal of any description the Games appear to be unfairly slanted towards the biggest and most developed nations, but as contests go they are probably no more unfair than Manchester United v Wigan or Manchester City v Everton. Yet Wigan not only beat Manchester United last season, they cost them the league title. That, fundamentally, is what football has going for it. You can train and prepare all you like, up to a point you can even spend what you like, but you never know on any given day whether or not one team will prevail against another.

That uncertainty, coupled with the ability of lesser sides to rise to the occasion and beat more expensive and talented opponents through sheer effort or force of personality, is what keeps football going through the long, dreary years when the Olympic sun is not shining through our windows. Four Champions League cycles, four league titles, four FA Cups and the odd World Cup, European Championship or African Cup of Nations. All of it televised, over-hyped and over-exposed. If football can survive all that and still keep inventing itself afresh each season, it can certainly survive a mayfly sensation like the Olympics, no matter how many medals Team GB ends up with.

Don't get me wrong, the Olympics have been great, still are being great. But in a couple of months they will be just a pleasant memory, and the present reality will be whether Chelsea or Arsenal can hack it on a wet Wednesday in Stoke. Yes, we've read that script before, but not everything in the world of sport has to be shiny and new. Sometimes the old scripts are the best, particularly the Saturday afternoon dramas.