I have been enjoying Michael Henderson’s mad commination of football in his book, serialised in this newspaper, 50 People Who Fouled Up Football. Hendo has always been at his best when choleric: Victoria Beckham is “this mousy suburban Circe”, Alan Green is “like all bores. He just talks”, and for Piers Morgan “Fame eludes him because true fame is determined by achievement”.

Football has changed since little Hendo (I’m sure even his parents called him Hendo) went to Burnden Park to watch Bolton Wanderers with his dad, who, being a vicar, would have known what a commination is. (God’s curse on all sinners, delivered annually on Ash Wednesday.) Hendo sees most, if not all, of football’s changes as bad. He misses barrel-chested yeoman-forwards, manly centre halves, fans who never believed that they had “an inalienable right to behave like scum”. And so he attacks all the symptoms of change with the rage of a berserker.

Behind the symptoms lurks a cause. Football really has changed over the last half-century. But is this actually bad? With every gain, something must be lost. With the end of the maximum wage, footballers ceased to be working-class comrades. What else has football lost, with all the other changes, so many of them to do with money?

I am reminded, oddly enough, of the England and Wales Cricket Board, and its behaviour over the question of whether or not it was right for England to play in Zimbabwe in 2003 and thereby lend support to Robert Mugabe. Its response was that the ECB has as much right to sell its product abroad as any other commercial venture.

An awful lot of us were upset by this. I don’t see the England cricket team as a product. They are not like the trousers I am wearing, the mobile phone in my pocket, the whisky I shall pour myself tonight. The England team are part of me and if they let me down I shan’t stop buying them. For me, for many, the England cricket team inspire a loyalty that survives disillusionment.

The England team are part of the dialogue I have with family, with friends. I celebrate their occasional beauties, thrill to their meatier opponents, savour above all the never-ending and enthralling narrative. The England cricket team are part of my story.

Therefore they matter to me. That’s why they are not a part of the entertainment business, even though they are entertaining and they make money. Woody Allen at his peak was a film-maker I loved, but he no longer entertains me and I haven’t bothered with his recent films. He is no longer part of my story, he hasn’t survived my disillusionment.

But sport has a meaning beyond such things. That’s not just a question of partisanship: Roger Federer’s victory at Wimbledon this year was a special thing for many people, and you didn’t need to be Swiss to share it. At the Olympic Games last year and at the World Athletics Championships this year, Usain Bolt set the world on fire. You didn’t have to be Jamaican to share the incredulous joy he imparted. Bolt has meaning because sport goes very deep. He possesses for us a value far beyond mere entertainment.

Of all the sports in the calendar, football has moved closest to the entertainment business, farthest from traditional sport. Football is showing the way that sport can go. It has achieved global dominance and impossible wealth: now to find out whether these things are good or bad for a sport.

Already, the relationship between footballers and football followers has changed beyond recognition. You won’t bump into your local centre forward in the pub, nor will he be running the pub in retirement. Footballers and followers now inhabit different worlds.

The notion of loyalty has changed dramatically. Players go where the money is without apology, feeling no ties to club or region or nation. Big clubs are now “global brands”, which is great for Manchester United. But as the rich have got so much richer, parity of competition has ended. How many clubs are in the running to win the Premier League this season? How many are even in the running to win the FA Cup?

So we must ask if people 50 years on are going to bother with clubs who are merely competing for the last Champions League place, or a Europa League place, or a respectable place, or any bloody place at all. Will people care about, say, Ipswich Town or Stevenage Borough? Or will we all be watching Manchester United on the television?

As the elite get eliter, will the second-raters and the fifth-raters and the tenth-raters still have their place? Will people bother with their dad’s club when they can watch Manchester United? Nobody knows. Football is in the midst of a vast experiment unprecedented in sport.

Football clubs used to be run by the local builder with dodgy connections, or the man who built up a chain of butchers with his own bloody hands. Now we have international billionaires who have to be called oligarchs. These people are in it for serious money, as well as for global prestige.

Players get paid staggering amounts of money. Some say they no longer care about the club, some say they don’t even care much about their own performance. Certainly, the nature of the financial reward affects the way players think. Is ambition a sporting or a fiscal matter? With the best, the question has no meaning, but there are an awful lot of players below that level.

The division between club and country has never been wider. In England, very few of the managers of big clubs are British, still fewer English. International football has always been the game’s most extraordinary phenomenon, uniting people in billions, many with only the haziest notion of what it’s all about, for the brief glorious frenzies of a great tournament. Club football — the financial power of the game — is now actively hostile to the international game.

Football has cheerfully abandoned its roots. It is cutting ties with its traditional supporters. It has altered itself beyond recognition for the convenience of television, with the invention of the penalty shoot-out. It has established a culture in which cheating is accepted.

But while all these things are true, we don’t know yet whether they actually matter, in terms of football’s continuation. As football shows the rest of sport how to make the transition from sport to the entertainment business, we simply don’t know if this process will destroy those things that sport alone possesses. That is to say, the loyalty that lasts beyond disillusionment.

Can football carry on if it erodes the idea that sport is part of one’s own story? Already many of the things that sport possesses are disappearing from football: loyalty, sense of identification, moral centre. Without these things football is nothing more than a business.

So these are the questions we must ask, the questions that lurk behind Hendo’s book: can football survive as a mere business? Can football continue to prosper by being merely entertaining? Can football survive without those things that give it meaning? I’ll tell you one thing for certain: if football continues on the route it has chosen, football is going to find out.