The Premier League has been criticised for soaring ticket prices a month after a commons select committee proposed a radical overhaul of the governance of football. Mark Perryman, a Spurs supporter and author of Ingerland: Travels with a Football Nation, asks former executive director of the Football Association David Davies what needs to be done to ensure soccer – and its fans – survive.

David Davies: When you talk about this whole issue of the cost of going to football, I go back to when I was child, going to my very first game at Chelsea in the 1950s and paying nine whole pennies. As a father of two, I absolutely get that it is expensive to go to football, particularly when there's more than one of you. I would make the cheaper seats cheaper, and the expensive seats more expensive. Children cannot get a ticket on the day of the match for the bigger games, so we should perhaps be making a number of tickets available.

Mark Perryman: My first game was at Chelsea, too. It was a school trip. Some of the fan campaigns are too romantic. I was going in the 60s, but by the 70s, you wouldn't let your child go – football had changed into something vicious, often unsafe, and not a very pleasant place to be for a good number of years. So we shouldn't be romantic about the past. At the same time, I think the crucial question is: Are fans – the fans who go to games – central to the culture of football? To me, what makes football such a rare, arguably unique spectator sport, is the presence and culture of fans. Over the past 20 years, fans are now defined as those who watch it on the TV, often in another country, or in the pub. The live experience of going to a game isn't as important as it has traditionally been. More people watch Manchester United or Liverpool around the world now than go to Old Trafford or Anfield. If you feel that isn't a problem then pricing isn't an issue. If you feel it is a problem – that the fans who physically go are an important part of defining football – then we have a significant problem.

DD: I used to debate inside the FA, long into the night sometimes, about what or who is the football fan? If I've been going through the turnstiles for 35 years, and now because of health or finance or whatever, I am not able to do that any more, and I rely on television coverage for my football, am I any less of a fan? Is it the fan in the stadium? If you watch football on the television, if the stadium is empty, it diminishes the experience. The game has been transformed since the dark days of the 80s – where what you describe about not letting young people go to matches is right – but at a cost.

MP: I think a season ticket in the [German] Bundesliga costs about 25% of what it costs in the Premiership. Is the Bundesliga so inferior that their top teams don't get into the European finals? No. At the same time, their league is so much more unpredictable. You can go home and watch games on terrestrial TV. And as we are painfully aware, the national team don't do too badly either. There are all kinds of inclusions and exclusions that go on. Tottenham is an intensely multicultural community, but you go to White Hart Lane and it is White Hart Lane. You go into a pub to watch Spurs on TV and it's incredibly multicultural. There is something wrong there. It's about price, but it's also about access to tickets. The season ticket has excluded the casual fan.

DD: Absolutely. But the Premier League, in its defence, I have to accept it is right when it says a wider section of society now feels comfortable going to football. I'm proud to have been a founder member of the Kick It Out campaign [to banish racism] in football. Have we gone far enough? Do these campaigns need new ways to build further? I think they do. I'm a season ticket holder at Old Trafford and I'm encouraged by the increasing number of ethnic minorities who are represented inside football grounds. Another major achievement has been the number of women and girls who go to football matches. I remember my last world cup with the England team in 2006; the Germans said they could not believe the percentage of England supporters who were female. It was strikingly different from other countries.

MP: The tragedy of the creation of the Premiership is that the FA no longer governs football because it has so little control over Premiership clubs. And if you're not governing the game, you cannot put the national team at the pinnacle. Does the FA have the control it should?

DD: The answer is patently obvious.

MP: I'll take that as a no.

DD: I bang on regularly about the lack of priorities across the game. Without agreed priorities, the clubs come first and the national team suffers. The DFB, the German equivalent of the FA, have had a 10-year agreement that sets out the priorities of German football. We have never been capable of achieving that. The conflicts of interest within our game have militated against that. Did my generation fail to resolve that? Absolutely we did. I hope the next generation will be more successful.

MP: Nobody should be romantic to think that football doesn't need money. It does. But that should come in to service football. You look at the FA, Uefa, Fifa – the entire culture is a corporate one, not a football one.

DD: We are in a global world now. At the top level, the game has become – I don't want to use the word "brand" – but I see English football as a great advert for England around the world.

MP: There are several pressures. One is the corporatisation of football. The other issue, probably beyond the scope of this conversation, is the crisis of kids not playing sport. The danger is, in a generation's time, kids will think football is a game you play on the computer. As you get away from the grassroots of the game, that is a frightening spectre. How near the top of their priorities would you say participation of kids in football would be for Richard Scudamore [the Premier League's chief executive] and [chairman] Dave Richards?

DD: [laughs] I'll duck that by saying they have to answer that question. They have huge pressures on maintaining the standing of the league that they have played significant roles in creating. Having said that, any part of our football cannot be successful without all parts of the game being successful as well.