As an enemy of football, I'm delighted by the crisis facing Liverpool. Its successes, traditions and combination of a global fan base with a strong geographical sense of identity make it a tricky institution to despise, but I can do it. It's complicit in one dull sport's infiltration of so many media and conversations, so much of the precious part of my brain that I reserve for ire and, at times of forthcoming national disappointment, so many upstairs windows and car aerials. It's the epitome of what makes football hard to kill: popular, successful and even charming. Assuming you don't support Everton.

So what better sign that my football-destroying hopes might be fulfilled than the mighty Anfield falling victim to a bitter and financially grubby hallowed turf war? Football's acquisitive ambitions are destroying it. Its popularity has allowed it to court the big money that's made its coverage spill out of the sport into the news, gossip and financial sections of newspapers, and stimulated huge TV and sponsorship deals, takeovers and transfers, oligarchs and sheikhs, as well as a community of young men so baffled by how much the world over-values their skills that they desperately oscillate between vacuous, self-important wives and cynical, publicity-seeking prostitutes – and then back to the wives again for the glum inevitability of financially motivated forgiveness.

And where has all this led? Liverpool FC, an organisation beloved of its fans with an international reputation for success in a global sport, could fall into the hands of the receivers. Football's market-friendly approach has allowed the club to be bought and loaded with debt by two American businessmen for whom its purchase was no more than a punt – and one which, like a lot of their punts, looks unlikely to pay off. They're shit foreign tycoons: their aims are reprehensible and they're not even up to achieving them.

Stories like this seem commonplace. People say it's the inevitable consequence of the "free market" and the "modern world". English football is now an environment in which players are millionaires, football clubs are plcs, valued in the hundreds of millions but paradoxically on the verge of insolvency, and fans can't even afford to watch their teams on TV.

Those responsible for this state of affairs would probably say that Liverpool's crisis is the regrettable counterbalance to all the advantages that the money flowing through football has brought. But what are these advantages that apparently compensate for a successful and venerable institution being put beyond the help of its millions of fans and left to the tender mercies of either two incompetent investors or the official representative of their creditors? In this case, the money has flown through the club with such pace and abrasion that it's taken the paint off the walls.

The answer, I suppose, is investment. In my view, only two basic types invest in football clubs. Liverpool is suffering from the first: speculators out to make money from clubs which were never constituted for that purpose. They see that, in its name, fan base, players or the location of its ground, a club has assets to be monetised and they buy in to do so. Sporting glory is only ever a means to their financial end just as, in seeking the investment, the club's talk of profit was once a means to its sporting one. Ultimately the two ends will be irreconcilable and, if the club had the latent strengths to attract an investor, it would have been better off finding independent ways of exploiting them.

The second sort of investor, like Roman Abramovich at Chelsea and Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City, are people so rich they can make a football club a loss-making vanity project. To me, this feels tantamount to cheating. Who's to say what club a random trillionaire might suddenly form an attachment to or have rabidly supported as a child? It's unfair on all the other clubs that one should be able to win the lottery, even if it pays for its luck with the indignity of becoming a tycoon's plaything.

And what would have happened without any of this investment? Would top flight football have stopped? Would tickets to matches be even more expensive? Or would Wayne Rooney just have had to settle for cheaper whores?

My schadenfreude will be short-lived because, where football goes, sports I like will follow. It may monopolise column inches but it has no monopoly on foolish governance. Most sports seem to be administered by a combination of incompetents and crooks, led by incompetent crooks. They court investment and corporate sponsorship while allowing ticket prices to rise and fixtures to proliferate. They are unshakeable in their belief that money will make everything better.

They're wrong. The appeal of sport is simple: people play it because it's fun and people watch it because they enjoy being swept up in the drama of two players, or two sides, trying their best to win. Sportsmen don't need to be playing for money to authenticate that drama, they just need to care. In fact, as soon as money is involved, there's the possibility that someone could secretly bribe players more than the prize money to lose. But while England and Australia play for an urn of ashes, they're likely to try their best because there's only one such urn available.

Sport is professional now and there's no going back. But, if only as a thought experiment to clarify sport's fundamental appeal and what its maladministration is jeopardising, it's worth asking how much good that professionalism has done.

Spectators' interests are so often ignored as if we're junior partners to businessmen and players. We are not. Without the spectators, the Emirates Stadium gets busted down to a kick-around in the park. The parasitic administrators say sport needs money – well, ultimately, it's our money. Firms don't buy advertising around pitches or on players' shirts unless they think the people who'll see it have more money to spend than it cost. We're the big money in sport and yet the sporting institutions we love are routinely bought and sold from under us.

An innocent pleasure has been made into a marginal business. The drive for corporate sponsorship and investment has been intense but what concrete benefits have supporters seen? Maybe players are better trained? Maybe skill levels are higher? But, if we hadn't seen those higher skills, we wouldn't miss them. We would have enjoyed watching the committed amateurs try their best – they'd have looked pretty good to us.