In a recent Question Time there was some disrespectful sniggering when MP Richard Burgon took time out from the debates about Brexit, grammar schools and Sam Allardyce to wax lyrical about a golden age of football when 'Leeds United were the best team in Britain - in Europe.' Most of the BBC audience just seemed baffled. 'It was in the 60s and 70s,' he added helpfully.

At the end of his paean to Don Revie's beautiful bruisers I half-expected the Leeds MP to break into a rendition of The Whites' catchy terrace anthem. No, not Marching On Together. I am referring, of course, to that Elland Road favourite of the past decade-and-a-half: We're Not Famous Any More.

David Dimbleby was clearly bewildered. To the rest of the panel, apart from a Ukip spokesman who less-than-fondly recalled the 'hard tackling' of Revie's great side, Burgon might as well have been talking in a different language.

A star-studded Leeds side won the top flight the season before the Premier League started

Don Revie transformed Leeds into a powerhouse during his 13-year spell at the club

Leeds United? Best team in Britain? Europe? Nurse, the screens...

The Shadow Justice Secretary's partisanship - he is a devoted fan - might have amused some audience members. But to those of us who have suffered the team's dismal years of decline and mediocrity, the fall of this once-great football club is no laughing matter.

Leeds' demise has, as Burgon pointed out, been bad for football. Even those who wince at the memory of the so-called Damned United - 'Every team had a hard man,' George Best once recalled, 'Leeds had eleven of them' - think that their 12-year absence from the Premier League has been a great loss.

As I watched Garry Monk's boys edge their way past Blackburn last month in a dire League Cup match I began to contemplate a few depressing thoughts. Yes, Monk is a good manager and, after a rocky start to the season, has presided over a run of form that has seen the club climb into the top half of the Championship table. But the attendance at that game was 8,488, the lowest for a competitive fixture for seven years.

And the former Swansea skipper is the seventh head coach to be appointed by trigger-happy owner Massimo Cellino in the past two years. For a city boasting a population of 751,500 - it is the third largest in the UK - and such an illustrious football history, how has Leeds been consigned, for so long, to the wilderness?

A bigger question, in fact, needs to be asked. How has Yorkshire, boasting a population of almost six million - bigger than nations like Ireland, Denmark and Norway - been starved of footballing success for so long? Why has the game in God's Own County been in decline since the Elland Road outfit exited the top flight in 2004?

Manager Garry Monk has helped Leeds climb up into the top of the Championship table

They attracted a crowd of just 8,488 against Blackburn - the lowest attendance in seven years

What I discovered, whilst spending two years travelling around the region for my new book A Yorkshire Tragedy, was that the demise of this former powerhouse can be traced back even further than that. Visiting the de-industrialised ruins of South Yorkshire in particular, and talking to fans, ex-players and former managers, I came to understand not only why there was a growing gap between these dispossessed-but-defiant communities and the moneyed elite of the south - but also why almost two thirds of people in these areas voted for Brexit.

The simple truth is that the teams in Leeds, Sheffield, Barnsley, Doncaster, Bradford City and Rotherham have, like their former industrial communities, been left behind in the New Football Era.

As Gary Neville wrote in a perceptive article last year: 'A North-South divide is developing in English football that reflects the drift in economic power towards London…We've seen the demise of Premier League clubs in Yorkshire… and Leeds and Sheffield Wednesday becoming marginalised. When I was growing up, trips to Elland Road and Hillsborough were among the biggest. They were FA Cup semi-final venues. They had a big club feel.

Trigger-happy owner Massimo Cellino has gone through seven managers at Leeds

'Children today wouldn't think of Leeds United as a great football club. Or Sheffield Wednesday. Clubs in the south-east who can claim to be within an hour of London seem to be developing a massive advantage.'

Neville wondered whether this collapse was 'cyclical or is something deeper going on?' The conclusion of my research was that, tragically, it is the latter.

Since the 1980s, as London has boomed – it now has a quarter of the nation's economic activity – there has been a reshaping of the sporting landscape, a pronounced southward shift in the balance of power. Football has become as lopsided as the economy. When the New Football Era began in 1992, the inaugural Premiership boasted four sides from Yorkshire: Leeds, Sheffield United, Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough. By the time I started writing the book, in 2015, the world's wealthiest league had virtually become a White Rose-free zone.

Gary Neville observed recently: 'A North-South divide is developing in English football.' Neville, pictured against Sheffield Wednesday, says kids now don't think of them as a big club

True, teams like Hull City and Boro tend to pop in and out of the top flight from time to time for short stays - usually a season or two - but these occasional forays are merely exceptions to the rule.

Yorkshire is no longer a footballing hothouse. The county is not famous any more.

This is the proud sporting region that produced the first recognised modern football club, Sheffield FC in 1857. And the first team to win three league titles on the spin, Huddersfield Town, in the mid-1920s. The Hull-born Ebenezer Cobb Morley devised the first ever laws of the game. And a Yorkshireman - Leeds boss Howard Wilkinson - was the last English coach to win the top-flight title, 24 years ago.

During the long boom between the recession of the early nineties and the financial crash of 2008, there were, admittedly, some high-octane adventures by the likes of Leeds, Wednesday and even Barnsley and Bradford. Often, however, these clubs ended up ridden in debt and plunged down the divisions.

'Every team had a hard man,' George Best once recalled, 'Leeds had 11 of them'

Best has (from left) Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter and Terry Cooper to get past in a 1970 clash

It was during this period that London's sporting base, like its economy, underwent a profound change, becoming a place where oversees investors could park their wealth. The richest city in the world began to provide some of its richest football teams, attracting the interest of oligarchs, sheiks and American venture capitalists. With the exception of Manchester, the balance of footballing power shifted away from the big-city northern clubs who dominated post-war football, towards Arsenal and Chelsea.

In his magisterial tome The Game of Our Lives - the 2015 William Hill sports book of the year - David Goldblatt wrote: 'For a region that had previously traded on its miserliness, Yorkshire football has proved particularly prey to the temptations of overspending and overindulging. Leeds United and Bradford City 'lived the dream' and, in a pyrotechnic display of hubris, exploded… In Yorkshire, the plot lines are all dark.'

At the beginning of the 21st Century, David O'Leary's Elland Road 'babies' scaled the heights of the Champions League semi-final before becoming entrenched in a debt that eventually forced them into various administrations, point deductions and relegations. The Leeds board's notorious recklessness - remember 'Publicity Pete' Ridsdale? - saw them borrowing £60million in the deluded belief they would qualify for the lucrative Champions League every season.

Eric Cantona (back row fourth right) was in the title-winning side along with Gordon Strachan (front, fourth left), Gary McAllister (front, third right) and Gary Speed (front, fourth right)

David O'Leary's Elland Road 'babies' reached a Champions League semi-final in 2001

They have fallen far since Rio Ferdinand and Co crashed out to Valencia

Such self-destructive extravagance was not confined to Elland Road. Huddersfield Town, Bradford City (twice) and Rotherham (twice) have all been in administration - and Sheffield Wednesday have been close to it on occasions.

This recklessness can be partly explained, but never excused, by a desperate desire to stop the rot, to break into the financial elite's virtuous circle, to play catch-up after their communities had been devastated by the unforgiving 80s. This was a decade of hell for Yorkshire football - the two horrific stadium tragedies at Bradford and Hillsborough took place in the county - when a large number of villages, towns and cities were left permanently scarred by the social, economic and cultural changes of that turbulent era.

Just like its great industries, many of its great football teams have never fully recovered from the harrowing of their region. Although enjoying fleeting success during the boom years of the 90s, the forward march of Yorkshire football has not only been halted but gone into reverse. The county has experienced sporadic bursts of ambition, often fired by a combination of financial hubris and Yorkshire grit, but these have tended to be followed by ignominious, debt-ridden collapses.

Sheffield Wednesday were almost back in the big time last year but lost the play-off final

Jessica Ennis-Hill was one of many proud Yorkshire natives in action at the Rio Olympics

True, there has been a sporting feel-good factor in the wake of the Rio Olympics; if Yorkshire were a country, it would have finished 17th on the medals table. And yet, whilst a great deal of money has been invested in 'podium level athletes', in the game which is most relevant to the everyday lives of most Yorkshiremen and women - football - its influence has atrophied.

Yorkshire's fierce, defiant non-conformism has, traditionally, acted as a counterweight to the dominance of southern elites, in sport as in politics and culture. God's Own County was once to London what Sparta had been to Athens: a harsher, tougher, more combative society.

Which is why the decline of this former sporting colossus should not only be mourned in the broad acres.

It should be a matter of national concern.