In this golden age for football, the threat of overkill looms ever larger

I t’s worth asking before launching into a jeremiad where you would have stood on major disruptions of the past. Have I become the old man who yells at clouds and is simply opposed to everything new? Would I have been against professionalism, the 1925 change in the offside law, the advent of European football, the foundation of the Premier League? Is this just the conservative creep of age? Perhaps. But, equally, it’s hard to look at football and where it may be headed and not feel fearful.

In some ways, football has rarely had it so good. The Premier League this season offers a title race, a battle for fourth and a nine-team relegation scrap; almost every match feels consequential. The World Cup provided a classic variant on one of the greatest narratives of all time, the ageing star triumphing at the last – and Lionel Messi’s consecration came after extraordinary tension against the Netherlands in the quarter-final and France in the final.

The knockout phase of the Champions League has not quite taken off yet this season, but in recent years has been a reliable source of drama and excellent football. Crowds in England, stretching down the pyramid, have never been so high. As David Goldblatt’s book The Football Age makes clear, the game has never enjoyed such universal appeal.

Yet that appeal is precisely what places it at risk. It is so popular, it has drawn not merely the spivs and the chancers who have always hung around its periphery, but private equity and oligarchs, dictators and the public investment funds of nation states. It is vast and global, essentially unregulated and probably unregulatable. Greed and gain are everywhere.

Look back at the Football Association grandees who withdrew from Fifa in 1928 over