The exchange of private text messages between then Cardiff City manager Malky Mackay and his assistant is, on the face of it, testament to the enduring and everyday sexism, homophobia and racism of the inner sanctums of professional football.

These are not trivial matters. The fact that black players make up around a quarter of the professional playing force but less than 2% of league managers suggests an ingrained institutional racism is at work. The private communications of Richard Scudamore, Premier League chief executive, suggest that an ugly and aggressive sexism is widespread among powerful men.

However, privacy, even among bigots, is a precious thing. For private communications to become the subject of wider public debate, possibly even legal proceedings, a case needs to be made that the public interest is being served and that these texts, after all, are not merely the ignorant and spiteful jibes of a football coach and a scout. That case rests, at least in part, on the fact that football has become an essential element of the nation's public sphere.

Alongside the explosive economic ascent of English football, its place in British culture has been transformed. Once merely popular, it has become ubiquitous. Once disdained by our cultural and political elites, it has become the subject of every serious art form and an essential component of many politicians' demotic hinterland. Once confined to the sports pages, it is now the subject of political and economic debate. No other cultural practice receives so much space in print, digital and social media. In a profoundly fragmented cultural landscape, this is no mean feat.

Football is no religion, but it possesses its own expressive and deeply rooted rituals around which national, regional and urban identities have been crafted. Few theatre productions give as central a role to the crowd in shaping the drama as football does.

Beyond the games themselves, football is like music with a tiny, professionalised circuit that draws strength form a vast hinterland of amateur play. It functions as a multi-stranded soap opera in which public performance and private lives serve as an interactive running commentary on the state of the nation.

Thus football, its pleasures and its meanings, are not only a central element of our common culture and public conversation, but they are collectively produced. Football clubs are imagined communities, not businesses. Football crowds are a chorus, not simply an audience.

The public and collective character of contemporary football is something that the industry is happy to embrace when the news is good. When the news is bad, as the events of the last week have shown, they are much more reluctant. Nowhere more so than when it comes to money.

Football's elite, like many of their business counterparts, live under the illusion that they alone are responsible for their economic successes. Consequently they believe that they owe little to the public realm, have few obligations to serve the common good, and have few qualms about keeping the lion's share of wealth.

Thus the Premier League's narrative of entrepreneurial and commercial energy – creating the best league in the world, or so runs the line – conveniently ignores a whole host of other factors and actions.

First, the rising popular interest in football preceded the arrival of the Premier League: 1985 was the nadir of attendances and in the seven seasons before the Premier League began they had been sharply rising. The value of ITV's football deals increasing and the excitement generated by England's journey to the semi-final of the 1990 World Cup also suggest that something bigger was at work than the formation of a breakaway league.

Second, the big clubs orchestrated the rewriting of the old rules established by the FA and the Football League to regulate commercial activity and mitigate the worst forms of financial inequality between leagues and within leagues. Above all, they were allowed to conduct a kind of modern institutional enclosure, in which the common property of football clubs' identities and histories was, by stealth and legal manoeuvre, taken into private hands in the form of holding companies. The game's new lords have never acknowledged the real value of the deep seam of football culture that preceded their arrival and sustains the playing and meaning of the game.

Third, they manage to forget the role of the state which, in the shape of the Taylor report on the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, insisted that the clubs do what they should have done a long time beforehand – invest in and transform their stadiums. This demand was sweetened by very considerable public subsidy and extortionate increases in ticket prices. The Major government relinquished more than £100m in levies on the pools and other forms of betting, and passed it on to the Football Trust. The trust, in turn, and for no stake or equity, passed the money to the clubs – providing around a quarter of the first wave of stadium redevelopment costs and the essential financial catalyst for change.

Premier League earnings: Manchester United owners Joel (left) and Avram Glazer. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

Most important of all, they have forgotten their own entrepreneurial record. The new football economy might by conventional reasoning be considered absurd. It's a madly spinning wheel of ever-larger cash flows that enriches a very small and highly specialised labour force – the players – but produces no profit; not that many of the clubs' owners can't find a way to enrich themselves. As the Glazers have demonstrated at Manchester United, huge soft loans and vastly inflated directors' fees are better than dividends.

It's a game awash with debt and, not surprisingly, plagued by insolvencies and administrations. These particularly affect the divisions below the Premier League, which carry the costs of turbulence and disruption – widening structural inequalities in income distribution that encourage reckless financial gambling by clubs.

The consequences of this kind of wilful amnesia are all around us; they're hardly restricted to football. Above all, it sustains the ideological hold of neo-liberal models of society and economics on the collective imagination and political process.

Read in a different light, the recent history of English football is as powerful a warning as one can imagine of the social and cultural costs of believing the kind of hokum that passes for analysis from football boosters and City analysts alike. It is hard to imagine a better example of the JK Galbraith couplet than the private opulence of the Premier League and the public squalor of grassroots football.

If football is rightly thought of as part of the public realm and as a common cultural good that is collectively produced, what should follow?

Mackay, Scudamore and their like must certainly expect that the kind of closed shop that allowed their antediluvian attitudes to endure is over. Beyond that, we might start thinking more imaginatively about how the dominance of the private over the public might be corrected. How financial imperatives could be constrained by social concerns, how we could mobilise around common rather than individual purposes.

As in mainstream politics, this is partly a matter of policy tools – new legislation regulating ownership and debt, reform and democratisation of the game's governance, the introduction of wage caps and social levies to sustain youth football.

But it is also a matter of our political imagination and will, recognition that we can and should reclaim the public realm. We are lucky that in the football nation the consequences of our failure to do so are as a trifling as England's lamentable performance at the 2014 World Cup. In the rest of the nation they are altogether harsher and more unjust.

David Goldblatt is the author of The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and the Making of English Football, to be published by Viking in October