Football is no longer England’s – this country is just the backdrop | Jonathan Freedland

The sale of broadcast rights reflects a wider shift: from property to finance, the UK has become the turf on which others play

My first mistake, he told me, was that I still thought of it as a game. Wrong. The best way to think of football was as a TV property, comparable to, say, Downton Abbey.

My conversations with senior figures in the Premier League are sufficiently rare that this one stayed with me. It was last autumn, a chance encounter on the fringes of the party conference season. As a relatively new convert to the game, I found each insider nugget fascinating.

The problem is that top flight football has soared far beyond the people who were once its anchors

What were once modest middle-class ambitions - owning a decent home, perhaps with a garden - are now out of reach