My first mistake, he told me, was that I still thought of it as a game. Wrong. The best way to think of football was as a TV property, comparable to, say, Downton Abbey.

My conversations with senior figures in the Premier League are sufficiently rare that this one stayed with me. It was last autumn, a chance encounter on the fringes of the party conference season. As a relatively new convert to the game, I found each insider nugget fascinating.

So I listened closely as he told me that, later that week, his colleagues would be taking the Premier League to market, selling the broadcast rights to TV stations across the world. He was all but salivating at the prospect. Events, he explained, had conspired to make this the perfect moment to sell.

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Mighty Manchester United had just been humbled by lowly Leicester City, battered 5-3. “This is the only league in the world where that happens,” he said, doubtless rehearsing the pitch soon to be made to the TV channels of south-east Asia, north America and beyond.

Such an upset would be unheard of in Spain or Germany. But unexpected plot twists were a reliable staple of the nearly year-round TV series that is the English Premier League. Did I know, for example, that a record 10 top flight managers had been ejected from their posts during the previous season? That was a selling point too. “It’s all part of the drama.”

The result was that the Premiership had become the most lucrative earner of overseas broadcast rights in the world. American football still makes a mint in America, but hardly anyone else wants to watch it. The right to screen Premier League games in tiny Singapore is worth more, he said, than all the cash America’s NFL generates from overseas broadcast sales put together.

There was something else too. International viewers liked the look of the fans at English games. The cameras would make a point of picking out families, women and children especially, along with diverse, non-white faces. He mentioned the group of Sikh fans often glimpsed over the manager’s shoulder at Old Trafford. Such a happy contrast with the Bundesliga, where crowd shots tended to consist of “white, male fans in their twenties, usually behind a metal fence”. Far less easy on the TV eye. In fact, the fans were so important, the Premier League would regularly write to clubs that had dared present a less than packed house for a televised match, scolding them for failing to provide a pleasing visual backdrop.

Every detail of that conversation came back to me this week, after Sky and BT agreed to pay a stunning £5.1bn for the UK rights to screen Premiership games for three years from 2016 – a massive sum set to be bigger still once international rights are sold again.

Many have rightly condemned the injustice that will see tens of millions of pounds fill the pockets of star players, their agents and club chief executives while fans struggle to pay some of the most exorbitant prices in world football, whether for season tickets or TV subscriptions. Others have fumed at a system that sees clubs engorged with ever more cash – yet still refusing to pay a living wage to those who serve the drinks, clean the toilets and man the turnstiles. (As an Arsenal fan, it pains me to record that of the top clubs only Chelsea pays a living wage to its lowest paid employees.)

The problem is that top flight football has soared far beyond the people who were once its anchors

The problem is that top flight football has soared far beyond the people who were once its anchors: the fans, the employees, and those who live and work near the ground. Those people are, as the man from the Premier League admitted, merely a TV backdrop now, a CGI special effect in human form.

The simple truth is, football has outgrown them. The fans might still think of Spurs or Liverpool as their local club – and it’s important to the TV producers wanting pictures of packed stands that they do – but it’s outdated. Everton or West Ham are now units within a global entertainment phenomenon, units that just happen to have a physical presence in Merseyside or London.

In this, football reflects something far beyond sport. Think of the London property market, where flats are bought and sold for astronomical sums – not as homes for Londoners to live in but as a form of reliable currency in which speculators from thousands of miles away can hoard their fortunes. Once again, the people who live and work in the area are not part of the picture – except as computer-generated stick figures on a glossy artist’s impression of this or that development’s future.

Meanwhile, this week’s HSBC tax revelations have highlighted once again the role of London’s cherished financial services “industry” – our capital city reduced to the role of a glorified funnel, through which might wash waves of the world’s cash. Whether it’s football, property or finance, Britain has somehow found itself as the venue for other people’s ventures, a small island that serves as the turf on which others play – at our expense. We’ve become extras in someone else’s movie. Sure, there’s a thrill in having world-class sport on your doorstep, but it brings little benefit to those hosting it: look no further than the parlous record of the England football team. Indeed, it’s come at such a great cost it’s pricing out those who should be enjoying it most.

In the same way, London’s conversion into an oligarchs’ playground has warped the housing market so badly as to alter aspiration itself. What were once modest middle-class ambitions – owning a decent home, perhaps with a garden – are now out of reach.

What were once modest middle-class ambitions – owning a decent home, perhaps with a garden – are now out of reach

The reflexive response to this shift has been a shrug of the shoulders, a passive resignation in the face of “globalisation,” as if it were an irresistible force of nature. But it’s no such thing. That which is manmade can be unmade.

There is no law to stop the Premier League clubs deciding that, say, 25% of this bloated TV cash should go towards lowering ticket prices, supporting lower league teams or nurturing the grassroots game. Indeed, if they won’t make that move themselves there should be a law forcing them to do it.

The housing market is similarly amenable to human intervention. If New York has rent controls, so could London. Foreign investors could be subject to a compulsory rental order: leave a property empty too long and you’ll be forced to rent it out.

Similar checks are not impossible on finance either, whether in the form of a transaction tax that would insist that when money passes through a country it brings some benefit to that country; or the kind of capital controls that worked effectively after the Asian financial crises of the 1990s.

The common thread here is that we don’t have to be powerless in the face of globalisation. We don’t have to simply sit in the stands and watch as our country becomes the hyper-capitalist version of George Orwell’s Airstrip One, the landing pad for global capital. This is our pitch. We can decide what happens on it.