A Holiday Inn on the edge of Birmingham Airport on a grey, blustery Saturday in November seems an appropriate setting for the opening weekend of the UK’s premier club chess competition. The 4NCL – short for Four Nations Chess League – brings together the cream of the country’s 10,000 or so competition players, plus a smattering of overseas titled players paid to add a bit of star quality to the teams. The grandmasters get a couple of hundred quid to play, plus accommodation and, if they’re lucky, food – in this case a pre-match baked potato garnished with cheese, beans or tuna. Diego Costa, eat your heart out.

Chess is not a glamorous activity. I almost said sport, but that designation remains contentious. The players who battle intensely in games that can last six or seven hours – heads in hands, tapping their feet nervously, pacing round the hall when it is their opponents’ turn to move, deepening into gloom as their position worsens before finally proffering a resigned handshake to indicate they accept defeat – are convinced they are engaged in a sport, but the UK government disagrees, defining sport as an “activity aimed at improving physical fitness”. It is true that chess might not improve your fitness level – witness all the beer-drinkers’ stomachs on show – but the stress level is as great as in any sport, and it has been proved that, in the course of an especially frenzied game, players can lose several pounds in weight.

The government’s ruling that the game is not a fully fledged sport denies British chess the recognition and financial support it needs to compete with established giants such as Russia and Ukraine, and fast-rising powers such as China and India, where young players are hothoused in elite chess schools and grandmasters are given state backing and ambassadorial jobs in commercial firms that allow them, in effect, to be well-paid full-time chess players. More than 100 countries recognise chess as a sport, as does the International Olympic Committee, which says it will consider including it in the 2020 Games in Tokyo. Chess in the UK is competing with one hand tied behind its back – a painful position in which to play.

Nigel Davies, a 55-year-old English grandmaster who was part of a golden generation that emerged in the wake of the great match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972, brought chess’s sense of frustration and marginalisation into sharp relief recently when he wrote a blogpost titled “The English Chess Implosion”, which bemoaned how far England – the second most powerful chess country in the world after the Soviet Union in the 1980s – had fallen. “Chess was cool here [in the 1970s and 80s], but now it’s sad,” he said. He followed that with a post attacking the game’s administrators – “a ragbag of chess amateurs who think they should be important but lack the knowledge and skill” – and said that his disaffection with the English Chess Federation was so great that he had switched his allegiance to Wales, making him the country’s first grandmaster.

‘The decline of chess here is essentially a question of finance’ … grandmaster Nigel Davies

As opening gambits go, Davies’s intervention was highly effective, especially as it coincided with the latest in a series of meltdowns at the English Chess Federation that saw the chief executive, Phil Ehr, ousted by his own council. Presented with a ballot paper offering Ehr or “None of the above”, the council opted for the latter.

When I speak to him on the phone from his home in Southport, Davies suggests the storm over his “defection” had been a little overdone – he had switched to Wales in the summer, and was merely mentioning the fact in his blog en passant. But he did not row back from his criticism of the people running chess in England, by far the strongest of the home nations.

“I thought people were basically clueless,” he says. “They didn’t understand that the decline of chess here is essentially a question of finance, and whether or not there’s an incentive to take chess much further when you’re a teenager and an adult. It takes an enormous amount of effort on every step of the way. If you’ve then got to finance these things – and very often it’s parents financing it – for month after month, year after year, there comes a point where you think: is it worth it, is this going to be a career?”

In the 1970s and 80s, when Davies’s generation – spearheaded by world-class players such as Nigel Short, Jon Speelman and John Nunn – emerged, the number of tournaments offering big-money prizes made professional chess an enticing prospect; you could turn the thing you loved into your profession. Now it is far more difficult to make a living from the game, and chess itself has lost the excitement and broad appeal it had in the “Fischer boom” period – hence the dearth of young master-strength players that prompted Davies’ original blog.

‘Heads in hands, tapping their feet nervously, pacing round the hall when it is their opponents’ turn’ … players under pressure at the 4NCL tournament. Photograph: John Robertson/The Guardian

While I am at the Holiday Inn, I talk to grandmaster Danny Gormally, an English pro who came joint second in the British championships this summer. The 38-year-old Gormally is famously lugubrious, yet at the same time very sharp, self-aware and amusing. He manages simultaneously to loathe the life he leads – still living with his parents in the north-east, perennially broke, prospectless – and to accept that his chess ability defines him. “If you’re not making a living, you feel like a bit of an idiot,” he says. “I feel increasingly self-conscious about my lack of money, and think people are looking at me saying: ‘What’s he doing as a chess player?’ The money is terrible now.”

Most pros make up the shortfall by coaching, usually children, but Gormally tries to live just by playing and writing the occasional chess book. “I’m not a very good coach,” he says. “I just don’t have the patience.” He tells me he won £1,400 for coming second in the British championship after a two-week slog. He was turning out at the 4NCL for a team called Blackthorne Russia, for which he was getting £300 and accommodation. Deduct his train fare from Northumbria – strong chess players, either for economic or complex cognitive reasons, are notorious non-drivers – and his profit was minimal. “I don’t think anyone now would seriously consider taking up chess as a career,” he says. “I’ve thought about giving up being a professional player completely and just getting a job – working in the Co-op or something. But chess is the only thing I’m good at, so you lose your special status. There’d be nothing to distinguish me from anyone else.”

While Gormally was doing domestic battle in Birmingham – he beat veteran Scottish grandmaster Colin McNab in his first game and drew his second against up-and-coming English 17-year-old Isaac Sanders – the most famous British player of the past century, Nigel Short, was representing England in the European team championships in Reykjavik, the city that hosted the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972. “You have to have an environment where people can play chess professionally,” he tells me on the phone, when I ask him why British chess is in decline. “If you don’t have that environment, people will do other things, and they will abandon chess or play it part-time, which is almost the same thing.”

‘It’s grossly immature, petty, pusillanimous’ … grandmaster Nigel Short on UK chess politics. Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

But does it matter if Britain’s teams perform poorly? England finished 28th, below Peru and Egypt, at the most recent chess olympiad, while Scotland and Wales trailed in behind Yemen and the Faroe Islands. “Chess is not the most important thing in life, that much is absolutely clear,” admits Short. “But I think we can afford as a nation of 65 million to have a few people devoting themselves to a very rich game with an incredible history. People sometimes ask me what I would have been if I hadn’t been a chess player, and I say: ‘Perhaps I’d be a lawyer like my elder brother.’ But does Britain need an extra lawyer?” Short likes to think that, as the only Briton to contest a world championship final – he lost to Garry Kasparov in 1993 – he has contributed a little more than that.

In part, Short blames the “small-mindedness” of chess players in the UK for the state of the game. “We have too much of a disconnect between the top players and the club players. It is very different in a game like football, where everybody has their heroes. You don’t have the attitude that you play for your local town’s third team and that’s all you care about, so why should you give any money to Wayne Rooney?” He also blames the federation. “It has a structure which is old-fashioned, to put it mildly. The recent elections were very negative. It’s one thing to oppose people you think may have made some errors, but to say ‘I’m pissed off with them so I’m voting to have no one’ is just bloody stupid. It’s grossly immature, petty, pusillanimous.”

Phil Ehr is paying a visit to the 4NCL opening weekend – he isn’t quite willing to let go yet after his recent ousting. A retired US naval commander resident in the UK who came into chess because his daughters played, Ehr is clearly hurt to have been defenestrated. “I was expecting some kind of opposition,” he says, “but I wasn’t expecting what happened. And I wasn’t expecting the kind of campaign [against me] that I now understand was happening.” Ehr was an unpaid chief exec, and had been a volunteer running junior chess before his two-year stint at the top. Getting beaten by a nobody (literally) was an unpleasant reward for his service.

“I was satisfied I was doing something to make chess less insular,” he says. “It had no ambition. Why weren’t we getting more attention and more sponsorship? But I had a vision that many of the board members didn’t share.” He says he was trying to develop proper governance for the organisation, but the subtext of the struggle is that he wanted to wrest power away from the organisers and arbiters (officials overseeing tournaments and adjudicating on disputes) who vote in the executive board. It was a classic king v country battle – played out in the smallest of arenas – and in the end the king got checkmated.

In his report to the federation’s AGM [pdf download] last month, the journalist and strong amateur chess player Dominic Lawson, who is president of the organisation, declared that “petty divisions and arguments within the ECF do nothing to help those of us who are attempting to persuade the government and sporting authorities that chess should be given enhanced status”. His warning, which went unheeded, underlines the peculiar rancour at the heart of the game, which is administered for the most part by middle-aged men who have been around for decades and built up all manner of petty jealousies and preoccupations.

A brief examination of a discussion titled “The arbiter nexus” on the English Chess Forum provides a flavour of these decades-long battles; some of these men – and they are all men – make dozens of posts every day, fighting ferociously to win the argument. Chess journalist Steve Giddins, himself not averse to a spot of mud-slinging, has christened the more venomous of the forum’s inhabitants “termites”. Lawson is right that the feuds, while diverting, do not help the cause of chess. Each league, each tournament, each region and association is, as Short suggests, an island unto itself, with no one seeing the bigger picture of a game, a sport, that is failing to win government backing, media coverage or, most important of all, public recognition and new converts.

‘Chess will continue in the UK … but how it continues is not really clear’ … the 4NCL tournament 2015. Photograph: John Robertson/The Guardian

Several of those I talk to invoke Sayre’s law, which states that “in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake”. Chess is a circumscribed world filled with mighty egos. In this world where, in truth, nothing is really at stake, the passions aroused are extraordinary. John Saunders, former editor of both Chess and British Chess Magazine, reckons the explanation lies in the nature of chess players: obsessive, attentive to detail, implacable, relentless. What makes for a strong chess player also produces a terrible diplomat, politician, administrator and sometimes, of course, quite an odd human being.

So what does the future hold? Davies believes the game is at a watershed. “Chess will continue in the UK,” he says, “but how it continues is not really clear. At the moment it looks more like becoming a minority game like go or shogi than a sport alongside darts. The next few years are going to decide, but if I had to bet on it then it would be that it will decline and become like go or checkers.” Some see the thousands who now play chess online or on apps as a source of hope, but Davies disagrees. “It’s not the same. The games have little value. You just finish the game and then start another one – it’s throwaway chess.”

Short sees signs of hope – notably the London Chess Classic, which starts at London’s Olympia on 4 December and attracts many of the world’s best players, including world champion Magnus Carlsen – but there are dangers, too, for a game whose place in the country’s cultural life has always been uncertain. Perhaps the glorious era of the 70s and 80s was the blip, and we are now reverting to mediocre type. Even when he strikes a modestly optimistic note, Davies makes the game’s future sound bleak: “It feels like a losing battle, but I’m sure chess will continue in some form. There’s so much history, so many stories, so many characters. This will be preserved, but it may not be as a living tradition.” Chess as morris dancing.

Stephen Moss’s book The Rookie: An Odyssey Through Chess (and Life) will be published next year by Bloomsbury