Where there is mention of football, money is never far behind. Even the briefest scan through the football pages of a paper or website gives plenty of cause to feel uneasy about the Premier League.

For instance: Manchester United will be paying £175,000 a week this season for the white elephant of their nightmares, Alexis Sanchez, now on loan at Inter Milan, not to play for them.

Fifteen miles up the M60 from Old Trafford, Bury went out of business after 134 years; in the aftermath, some Premier League clubs made half-hearted murmurs about maybe possibly offering a few more crumbs to teams further down the pyramid. At Newcastle United, beloved former players such as Rob Lee are urging fans to lay off Steve Bruce and focus their ire instead on the man Lee calls “the real villain”, the owner Mike Ashley.

Regrettable though he and Sports Direct may be, Ashley is far from being the only club owner in the division whose background and methods demand more scrutiny than they get: the morality or otherwise of Abu Dhabi’s so-called sportswashing via Manchester City being the highest profile example, but far from the only one.

The common thread in those four stories is money and, or so a book out this week argues, specifically the money that comes into the Premier League from subscription television. Can We Have Our Football Back? How the Premier League Is Ruining Football And What We Can Do About It, by John Nicholson, is an intriguing and thoughtful attempt to crystallise a sense that many people have about how the Premier League is contested, marketed and consumed in 2019. And that sense is that something is rotten.