Has accepting US and Middle Eastern money into UK football ruined a working-class pass-time?

There was no fault line to speak of here, only degrees of certainty: voters concluded, by five to one, that the American and Gulf cash pouring into English football has done for its working-class character, and the argument was really about how emphatically to say so.

Middle age settled it without dissent — the 45-54s to a person, the over-65s to a person — while the 25-34s and 55-64s were barely less united. The one flicker of resistance came from the youngest voters, split closer to two-to-one, perhaps the cohort least burdened by memory of terraces and cheap season tickets and most at ease with a Gulf-owned club winning things. Men and women, tellingly, saw it identically.

The result reads as a verdict on two decades of Premier League transformation — the Glazers, Fenway Sports Group, Abu Dhabi's Manchester City, Newcastle's Saudi owners — and on the broader unease about sportswashing and the financialisation of a game once organised around local loyalty and affordable admission. It sits alongside debates over the ECHR and sovereign wealth that keep surfacing wherever foreign capital meets British institutions.

Nostalgia, on this evidence, still outvotes the trophy cabinet.