According to football legend John Barnes, England will never win a World Cup until our footballers embrace their inner socialist. "Players from other nations when they play for their country are once again a socialist entity, all pulling in the same direction," he told the journalist Mihir Bose last week. Apart from citing Brazil and Argentina as role models seamlessly making their way to the World Cup final, he was spot on.

The best football teams are socialist in nature. They play for each other, and individual brilliance is often subservient to the common good. Even the language of team sport is socialist – solidarity, unite, goal, come together. Why do you think the word United is so beloved by football people that 15 clubs in England's top four division divisions have it in their title? Barcelona, possibly the world's most successful club, are the living embodiment of our old clause four (remember that?) – owned by the supporters for the supporters, they have indeed "secured by hand or brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof" as some of us used to say.

Which takes us back to England players and the Premier League. Never has there been a more pure and banal example of the cult of the individual: a Premier League in which everything is measured by money and the success that that money has bought, and the money that that success will then generate: the supreme hydra-headed monster. This is a world in which the moneyed insist on the right to instant success and if it's not forthcoming a teamful of heads will roll at the end of each season (look no further than my club, Manchester City). Of course, your Lampards and Gerrards and Rooneys know exactly what they are worth – what they are paid.

Is playing for England as important as playing for Chelsea, Manchester United or Liverpool? No, because the monetary rewards don't compare. Meanwhile the "best league in the world", as it constantly touts itself, continues to eat itself – more and more clubs in massive debt, less and less homegrown players nurtured, and little chance of a successful future England team because such is the demand for instant gratification in the Premier League that there is no time to cultivate future World Cup winners.

Forget Brazil and Argentina, the team that has really played like a team, with Barnes's socialist footballing principles, is Germany – 11 players on the pitch, 23 in the squad, working together for the common good; none of them superstars, and most playing in a German league that doesn't elevate the individual above the collective.

Football's greatest managers always knew how much the sport owed to socialism. Brian Clough, who gave tickets for Derby's games to striking miners and agitated for a player walkout (admittedly after he had walked out on Derby), was once asked by the former Labour MP, Austin Mitchell, whether he was a superstitious man? "No, Austin, I'm not," he answered. "I'm a socialist." Sure he drove a Mercedes, but he wanted everybody to be able to drive a Mercedes. A slice of bloody cake for all, that was his philosophy.

Bill Shankly, possibly the greatest and wisest of them all, believed football and socialism were inseparable. "The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That's how I see football, that's how I see life," he said.

As for the World Cup, we should have known there was no chance of glory for the Three Lions with a Con-Dem coalition. After all, England has never won the World Cup under the Tories or the Liberals, or the Liberal Democrats, or New Labour. As Harold Wilson boasted in 1966: "Have you ever noticed how we only win the World Cup under a Labour government?"