In Spain recently, photographs from Racing Santander’s cup match against Real Sociedad, which showed the home team’s players linking arms on the half way line, suggested the game had gone to a penalty shoot-out.

In fact Santander’s footballers, who ply their trade in Spain’s third tier of professional football, were staging a protest against their club’s directors.

They allege they have not been paid for several months and so withdrawing their labour, and probably being kicked out of the competition once the tie was abandoned after two minutes, was, they felt, the only option remaining open to them.

Given our collective perception of European professional football and the enormous sums of money sloshing around its grubby environs, the players’ action will elicit little sympathy, even though the likelihood is the Santander team earn perhaps just a few hundred pounds a week.

Away from the continent’s so-called ‘big’ leagues, — the ones generating most broadcast revenue — the majority of professional footballers are not blinged-up dilettantes pocketing £100,000 a week, net of tax.

North of the border, for example, average Scottish Premier League wages hover around £35,000 a year.

Yet whatever the merits of their case, the image of Racing Santander’s rebels performing their show of solidarity could be replicated here within a few years.

I do not mean we are likely to see Chelsea’s or Manchester City’s collection of foreign mercenaries complaining from behind the darkened windows of their baby Bentleys about their respective employers’ failure to stump up the weekly mountains of cash each player demands. No.

A much more probable scenario has banner-waving pensioners, arms linked and Thermos flasks at the ready, marching towards Downing Street, fervently demanding pension payments be restored for those aged under 80.

Far fetched? Not quite.

Pensions, as everyone knows, are a complicated business.

In fairness, the Government has endeavoured to alleviate many of the state system’s multi-tiered complexities by introducing single, flat-rate pension payments from April 2016.

On the same day as Racing Santander’s players staged their protest, the Government put forward a series of other ideas for enhancing the basic state pension.

The ‘headline’ proposal would allow folks who have already reached retirement age by April 2016 to top up their lifetime pensions.

The suggestion is that an investment of £900 would boost an individual’s pension by approximately £55 a year. The investment would, however, be limited to around £25,000.

The mathematically-inclined will have already established that this represents an annualised, and presumably state-guaranteed, index-linked gross return of 6.1 per cent.

Such a proposal would be especially attractive to women, who not only live longer, but often have significant gaps in their National Insurance contributions (NIC) from the years when they were looking after children.

It would also benefit the self-employed, who are solely reliant upon their own efforts to ensure contributions are made.

But even assuming that pensioners have the necessary spare capital knocking around with which to buy an additional pension, there are flaws with this prime, jam-tomorrow proposal. The most obvious one is — how will this largesse be paid for?

Regrettably, the Government’s suggestion was accompanied by little detail.

Actuaries will point out that for every £900 invested in the scheme, even at gross returns of 6.1 per cent, it will take more than 16 years for the Government to return to people what they pay in.

Moreover, if the additional £55 a year is taxed at say, 20 per cent, it will take 20.5 years for the state to hand back what it takes in the form of capital investment. Assuming a 66-year-old makes a lump sum investment in the scheme, he or she will be almost 87 before they see a positive return on their money.

Admittedly, the proposal will not apply to millions of folks but this and similar schemes still need to be properly funded, even though some might argue this one is effectively self-funding.

Yet given the Government’s unwillingness to borrow, one of the simplest means of providing comparatively generous pensions is to increase what it calls the ‘entitlement threshold’ — by raising the age at which it distributes those pensions.

The unusual scene of professional footballers linking arms in protest could be as nothing compared with thousands of furious 70-somethings making their way towards Downing Street at some point within the next decade.

No-one believed the former scenario could arise — the second most definitely could.