Can further calamity befall the English? There we were on Monday night, willing the multicultural football team to provide some cheer amid political collapse, unleashed xenophobia and a tanking economy. Instead they lost 2-1 to tiny Iceland, in another ignominious exit from Europe.

But the surprise is that people are surprised. Football is our national game, and has always reflected the country’s broader social and economic themes. Never has it done it quite so unerringly as against Iceland: the team’s departure and manager Roy Hodgson’s prepared resignation speech came just hours before the council of Europe meeting from which David Cameron will have to withdraw, so 27 countries can shake their heads at how inept we are and wonder what to do about us.

Back in the 1980s, rundown football grounds, fenced-in “pens” for supporters and brutal policing were just another feature of the Thatcher project’s general deindustrialisation and hollowing-out of our provincial towns and cities. Three decades since those cruel practices culminated in 96 deaths at Hillsborough, football still holds up a mirror to the country we have become, and reflects its dominant faultline: inequality.

The players who failed for England against the collective strength and spirit of Iceland’s are each paid between £5m and £10m a year to turn out for clubs in the Premier League, which is feasting for the next three years on £8bn in television rights. The playing fields on which all those players began their journeys have been underfunded for years and are now facing a renewed crisis because of cuts to local authority budgets. Ticket prices to watch professional clubs have rapidly increased, so young people have been excluded.

Iceland celebrate Gylfi Sigurdson’s (10) equalising goal against England. Iceland went on to win 2-1. Photograph: ProSports/REX/Shutterstock

In Lord Justice Taylor’s post-Hillsborough report, he registered his disgust at the mismanagement of the national sport by football club owners and directors who were more interested in “wheeler-dealing in the buying and selling of shares and indeed of whole clubs”, and in “personal financial benefits or social status” than in the good of the game itself. It was an unintended consequence that Taylor’s own recommendations, for stadiums to become all-seater with venal owners given public money to aid the rebuilding, led to more “wheeler dealing” in clubs than ever before.

The huge new TV money first arrived in 1992 after Rupert Murdoch’s executives realised that only football could bring the battalions of addicted subscribers they needed to grow Sky TV. The Football Association, the game’s governing body, responsible for its nurture from the grass roots to the England team, sanctioned the top flight clubs’ breakaway to form the Premier League - an act of heroic myopia. The FA’s committee men actually believed the move would strengthen the England team; the moneymen saw their chance not to share the new satellite TV bonanza with the rest of football.

The subsequent sales of the football companies, still misleadingly referred to as “clubs”, has mirrored the flogging-off of other national assets – trains, water, gas and electricity companies – built up by generations of public service. The FA had a century-old rule restricting dividends and salaries so that football clubs would in effect be not-for-profit communal institutions, but they allowed it to be bypassed for stock market flotations. Now the top clubs, bearing the names of our towns and cities, are owned mostly by American investors eyeing TV fortunes or by billionaire oil traders building global football brands.

The English owners who sold their shares made massive personal profits: David Moores, the Littlewoods heir, £90m for his stake in Liverpool; Martin Edwards, £94m from Manchester United; Sir John Hall, £75m for flogging Newcastle United to Mike Ashley.

The Premier League is particularly popular as a global TV spectacle partly because the clubs have spent the windfalls attracting players from all over the world with booming wage packets. At the same time, the number of English players in the league has shrunk since 1992 to its current 30%, with the Premier League persistently and risibly denying that this in any way contributes to the serial failure of the England team.

And so it is that every two years, at a European championships or World Cup, the window dressing is stripped away, revealing the football nation we are: one with people at the top massively overpaid but lacking vision and expertise, a paucity of competent managers and a wider landscape of poverty, underfunding and exclusion; and accompanied this year, as we have seen, by a boorish crowd chanting, “Fuck off, Europe, we’re all voting out.” Theirs has become our country’s dominant voice, their team a reflection of the game’s deficiencies that we will not confront.