There is not a section of this newspaper untouched by the credit crunch. Just this week I read in the fashion pages that I should cut the sleeves off my coat, not to look like someone who cannot afford sleeves but to follow the trend for sleeveless coats, at a fraction of the cost. I have avoided the temptation simply to wear a body-warmer.

I have already seen on these sports pages some of my learned colleagues pondering what the global financial meltdown will mean when it comes to the business end of sport. Can the extortionate global television rights for Formula One or the Barclays Premier League remain unaffected? How can any British or American bank ever sponsor anything again?

Will footballers' salaries tumble and fall in line with those of teachers and nurses? Will there still be prawn sandwiches on offer in the corporate boxes at Old Trafford next season? Well, none of us can control all of that; they are big questions for even bigger people.

But I believe that this credit squeeze is going to be good for grassroots sport and therefore good for all of us in the long run - as long as we do not end up homeless. Sport will blossom through all of this and here is why. Sport is cheap to do, unless you take up round-the-world sailing.

There is quite a lot of sport that costs next to nothing: running, swimming. cycling (if you have a bike), football, rugby and netball require minimal financial outlay and only a little organisation. Even when times are hard we need to keep ourselves entertained and what could be more fun than getting a group of friends together for a game of rounders or football? OK, a few years ago you would have been able to list quickly the things that could be more fun and they were all expensive and some were illegal. Well, my new frugal friends, the times they are a-changin', and we need to tighten those belts. Free fun is the best fun in 2008.

The benefits extend far and wide, for, while we are all going round releasing the sportsman/woman within, we will be flooded with happy hormones and getting physically fitter at the same time. We will be less of a burden on the state, healthier and more mentally stable in our new sporty existence and not using the NHS so much. This means that the Government can use the surplus money to help to plug the gap in the money promised to help our sportsmen and women preparing for the 2012 London Olympics.

One negative effect will be that the NHS will have to increase its outpatient physiotherapy units because of the inevitable rise in lower-back problems, a direct result of people engaging their core for the first time in years. But, with rising energy bills, running and cycling to work will become commonplace and family keep-fit sessions will postpone the need to put the heating on for a few hours on winter nights.

In among all of these casual new sportspeople there will be talent unearthed - real talent, which may otherwise have lain dormant playing on expensive video consoles. So, just as necessity is the mother of invention, a financial depression can be the creator of great athletes. Did Roger Bannister break the four-minute mile in a time of great prosperity? No, it was 1954. Life was tough, the economy was getting back on its feet after the Second World War. Bannister may have gone to a top university and he may have been from a well-to-do family, but he was not spending his summers in Faliraki getting drunk.

Was Haile Gebrselassie the son of a banker? Of course not, the Ethiopian distance runner and world record-holder of the marathon was one of ten children who ran ten kilometres to school every day. He still runs with a crooked arm where the books in his left hand used to be. In 20 years' time, will we be talking about Locran Dubois, world mile record-holder and son of an unemployed hedge-fund manager who has a slightly odd running style, his right arm permanently bent where his Apple Mac used to sit as he ran 15 miles to school round the M25?

Look how fantastic we felt in August. We knew we were heading into financial turmoil, but for a few weeks the Olympic Games in Beijing made us forget about the repossessions and the cancelled holidays because we were winning gold medals.

We are all hoping that things will not get so bad that we feel we are living in pre-1990 East Germany, but not owning houses and cars did not stop them winning medals on the world stage, even if the prolonged performance-enhancing drug use changed their sex years later. Gold medals are the new opium of the people.

Lack of funds will even affect the way we watch live sport. Why pay £250 to take your children to watch a Premier League match, such as at Stamford Bridge, and worry about how you are going to park and how much it will cost to feed them, when you can walk around the corner and watch a group of honest young men trying their hearts out playing for teams such as Prescot Cables or Broadheath Central? They may even chat to you after the match if you buy them a pint.

Wherever you live there will be a local team who would love your support and usually you can take family pets (if you can still afford your dog) and your children for free.

Watching sport at home on TV will change, too. Families will get together to watch darts on a Saturday afternoon and grown-ups will organise evenings-in around the big matches. This may be the end for unadulterated consumerism and the urgent need to satisfy our material longings, but it is just the beginning for grassroots sport.

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• Graham Spiers