People used to mock Manchester United because they had fans in Chertsey and Richmond. Now they have fans in Ouagadougou and Kowloon Tong as well – and so do most other clubs in the Premier League. In recent months I have discussed intimate details of life in the Premier League in Zambia, in Kenya, in France and even in Italy, a place that prides itself on its own football.

The league has become England’s great export to the world. Where the British once sought to buy hearts and minds with beads and mirrors, guns and sewage pipes, we now supply the sexiest brand of football in the world.

Not the best. English clubs have only won the Champions League – the top club competition in Europe and the world – twice since the Premier League was formed in 1992 (and both those victories were distinctly fortunate). If you want the best, Spain and Italy are the places to go. But it’s the Premier League that people want from one side of the world to the other.

What is it that English football has got right here? The best players in the league are not English: a Portuguese, a Spaniard and an Ivorian are the top draws in the English game. Is it the way the English run their clubs? Four Premier League clubs are in American hands, two are run by Russians, there’s also an Irish consortium, an Icelander, an Egyptian, and another who is the former Prime Minister of Thailand.

This is not so much the English as the world’s football league. But it still has something inescapably English about it: and that’s what gives it the edge over those suaver, sexier, cynical, clinical teams from football’s European heartland.

The Premier League is full of the English capacity for madness. It is is played by people who leave their brains hanging up with their blazers. The football is full on, played every week on the edge of dementia. No matter how slick and sophisticated you are to begin with, when you come from some foreign land to ply your trade in the Premier League you’ll be playing like a madman before your first season ends.

That’s if you can last the pace, the wild tackles, the long periods when tactics are thrown out of the window, the crashing bodies, the penalty area pinball, the dreadful errors of overcommitment, and the endless, endless running. Premier League football has two speeds: flat-out and half-time.

But all this makes a wonderful spectacle for people who love spectacle more than excellence. And, let’s be fair, there are marvellous moments of excellence as well, seen to great advantage when set off against the running-with-the-bulls intensity. The league is long on spectacle, long on drama, long on emotion.

It seems to be an infection that comes from English soil. You can field a team full of foreigners, as Arsenal and Chelsea frequently do, but they won’t play like a foreign side. For all the skill, for all the difference in footballing cultures, they will go out and run themselves silly, tackle like maniacs and play as if every match were a matter of life and death. But it is not the soil that does it. It is England’s footballing culture, and it comes from the fans who will howl and sing and drink in a manner incomprehensible even to fellow-Englishmen. It is these people who power the Premier League, these people brimming with devotion worthy of a better cause. It is this band of maniacs that creates the emotional intensity of football grounds in England: and this in turn transforms the most cerebral player that ever lived into a berserker.

That is what English footballing culture comes down to. It is this madness that has made the Premier League not the best but the most passionate league in the world. And never mind the skills, it’s passion that has conquered the world.

Talking millions

600 million Number of homes in 202 countries to which Barclays Premier League games are broadcast
1,000 million Estimated worldwide audience of Man U v Arsenal last November
330 million Number of supporters worldwide that Man U claim, 83 million in Asia
£625 million Value of the Premier League’s foreign broadcast rights 2007-2010
£4.7 million Amount BSkyB pays to broadcast domestically each of its 92 games a season
£245 million Turnover of Man Utd in 2006-07. They claim that they are the richest club in the world