IN THE final moments before the teams run out, giant banners drift across the Kop stand, tugged over the heads of Liverpool Football Club’s most besotted fans. It is intensely theatrical. These are not mere pennants—like the ones nearby expressing typical Merseyside sentiments, such as “Thatcher, burn in Hell!” They are stage curtains, which roll back as the Liverpool team forms up against Chelsea, to reveal thousands of grim-faced Scousers who are suddenly, in an explosion of song, the main act.

“When you walk through a storm/ Hold your head up high/And don’t be afraid of the dark…” Most English football clubs have anthems. But none is more powerful than the Rodgers and Hammerstein number “You’ll never walk alone” belted out from the Kop before a big game; and that between Liverpool and Chelsea on April 27th was the biggest of the season. Holding up their red and white scarves, like stoles for a papal blessing, the Koppites tap the vast emotion invested in a club with almost as many glories and tragedies, over its 122-year history, as the city it claims to represent. No wonder so many foreigners want a piece of this.

Under its second consecutive American owners—Fenway Sports Group, which also owns the Boston Red Sox—Liverpool claims to have over half a billion supporters. Given a possible television audience for the English Premier League of 4.7 billion, that is just about credible. And the prospects for future growth, as millions more Asians go giddy for the league, are stupendous. Yet there is a hitch, to which “You’ll never walk alone” also points. Because its promise of mutual support in adversity is as much about the fans who sing it as the team they revere. It is not just an expression of love, but also an assertion of ownership.

To whom do England’s famous football clubs belong? To the foreign investors who own most of them? To the Mephistophelian television companies whose billions drew them and so many foreign players to the league that less than a third of its footballers are now British? Or to local fans, keepers of the institutional culture in which most of the clubs’ brand value resides?

The question has loitered uncomfortably ever since Rupert Murdoch snapped up the newly formed league for his then-struggling satellite television channel, BSkyB, in the early 1990s. Yet apart from occasional bursts of protest—for example, under Liverpool’s previous American regime and Manchester United’s current one, both of which loaded the clubs with huge debts—fans have put up with the gross commercialisation that has ensued. In compensation for soaring ticket prices and match times devised around Asian TV schedules, they have had better facilities and wondrous football. Yet the disgruntlement is starting to coalesce.

In 2012 Cardiff City’s Malaysian owner, Vincent Tan, changed the club shirt from blue to red, in a bid to attract more Asian fans. This sparked outrage and a campaign group, Stand Against Modern Football, which is said to have 150,000 followers. They demand, among other things, a bigger say for fans in the running of the clubs. Many look yearningly to Germany, whose clubs are rich, excellent and 51% owned by fans. A bad showing by England at this summer’s World Cup, which is likely, will increase the disgruntlement, by highlighting the Premier League’s failure to promote home-grown talent. So will the next wave of ticket-price inflation, which the debt-laden clubs feel is overdue. That is despite the fact that prices have already risen by 189% in real terms over the past three decades, pricing out younger fans.

It is possible to take a relaxed view of this. English football has thrived on globalisation more than most British industries. Even the most aggrieved Koppite must feel proud, on his holidays, to see so many Liverpool shirts being worn in Thailand or Vietnam (and he will worship Luis Suárez, a Uruguayan striker). The economic benefits are also vast: Premier League clubs are thought to contribute over a billion pounds a year in tax alone. Yet the erosion of Britain’s dominant sporting culture, which it is contributing to, if not causing, should not be disregarded.

What remains of British civic pride is heavily centred on football teams—especially in struggling northern cities, such as Sunderland or Stoke-on-Trent, which have little else to shout about. The weekly footballing ritual also maintains in Britain an important sense of the shape and reach of the nation; perhaps Scotland would not be contemplating leaving the union if its best teams played in the Premier League. The risk is that, as English football becomes increasingly a confection of foreign players, playing for foreign television audiences, under English brand names, these benefits will be lost. Greying football crowds, a sign of weakening club loyalties, suggest it is happening already.

For the love of the game

Hence, for many, the significance of the recent encounter at Anfield, which offered Liverpool, recently in fine form, a big opportunity to boost its chances of winning the league. This would be a wholly unpredicted outcome, which many romantically inclined neutrals, such as Bagehot, would cheer.

Though no pauper, the once-great club is much less rich than the league’s usual winners. Its wage bill—a dully accurate predictor of footballing success—is two-thirds Chelsea’s and half that of Manchester City, which is owned by an oil sheikh. Liverpool fans, as the club’s previous owners found out, are also refreshingly old-fashioned in their fervour and intolerance of overweening owners. Divided in its loyalties between Liverpool and Everton—an even greater over-achiever—their city is one of the last in Britain where it can truly be said, in the famous phrase of one chronicler, that “football is inherent in the people”.

Yet Chelsea won, 2-0. There would be no blow for hoary football tradition—save in one, generally unwanted, regard. Chelsea played in a joyless and cynical way, untypical of the Premier League. It was a reminder, in the reliably chopped logic of sport, of how far the game has progressed; albeit not without cost.