Change is a powerful concept. The older you get, the less you tend to like it as you reach for the comfortable and the familiar. The younger you are, the greater the appeal of the "rebel yell" and the desire to tear up all that went before and to replace it with a new world order.

Football, yet again, finds itself caught on the horns of these dilemmas as the world outside its doors threatens to kick them down and engulf it as the economic tsunami that is just gathering pace around the globe prepares to obliterate all in its path.

Many, too many, major football clubs around the globe, especially in Europe, are institutions that have somehow managed to live beyond their means in spite of the huge influx of money into the game over the last 20 years, most notably in England. All the riches have flowed straight through their hands and back out again with barely a thought for ploughing anything back into the clubs, or holding anything back for the proverbial rainy day. Just as when the crash came we discovered that the banks didn't have enough to fall back on, it turns out he football clubs have even less.

What they do have though is a well honed instinct for self preservation. In England, we first saw it at the tail end of the 1980s when the "Big Six" of the time concluded that a poisonous cocktail recession and hooliganism were threatening their ability to print money and that if the rest of the game didn't let them create their Super League, they'd disappear off into the sunset and do it themselves. The game caved in and the Premier League was born.

But 20 years on, and the Premier League itself is suddenly in peril, for times change much quicker these days. It took 100 years before the old system was declared obsolete - the many benefiting from an equitable organisation of the game was deemed so passé, so pre-Thatcher, and nowhere near as good as the few benefiting from regressive elitism instead - but two and a bit decades might be all the Premier League gets before its own model gets fatally called into question.

At the moment, it is being stretched and pulled, torn at by conflicting centrifugal forces that drag it this way and that, all of them powered by the same thing. You're not going to need three guesses are you? It's money. Let's wind it back a few weeks and recall that Liverpool's Managing Director Ian Ayres was insistent that clubs like his should be allowed to negotiate their own individual overseas TV rights because "With all due respect" nobody in Singapore or Japan tunes in to watch Bolton Wanderers, they just want to see Liverpool. Quite how they're going to see Liverpool if Bolton don't turn up for their game is a logical conundrum he chose not to address, but there's no time for such niceties when there's money to be made. The man who now speaks for the club that Shankly built on the principles of unity, of serving the people, can see Manchester City disappearing into the distance, can see that there is no way on God's earth that Liverpool will ever get title 19 in the current climate and so he needs to change the weather forecast. And you see that place where the sun doesn't shine? That's where we'll put unity.

The constitution of the Premier League would require 14 clubs to sign up to such an idea and, in the time honoured fashion of turkeys not putting their cross next to the word "Christmas", it's unlikely that Wigan, Wolves, Bolton, West Brom, Norwich, Swansea, Blackburn, Fulham, Stoke and a few others are going to sign up to that.

What was interesting though was that just a few days later, the League Managers Association, an unlikely source, floated the suggestion that there are plenty of owners in the top division - notably those naughty foreign ones - who would gladly see an end to relegation and create a hermetically sealed Premier League. All in and lock the doors behind us lads. It's a complete derogation of the sporting principles and it might well be that UEFA et al would have something to say about it, but would they kick English clubs out of Europe as some suggest? The territory that brings in all that revenue to the Champions League? I suspect not.

There are those among us who like the odd conspiracy theory, and the timing of those two pronouncements was intriguing, coming so close together as they did. It has the smell of a quid pro quo about it, the smaller clubs perhaps giving Ayres' idea the nod on the understanding that they can remain on the gravy train in perpetuity. I'm sure no such things have gone on, for as the evidence of the last five years tell us, the corporate world is as pure as the driven snow and any backroom deals are all above board, but it makes you wonder doesn't it?

The pushing through of the Elite Player Performance Plan dealing with youth football barely gives rose to any optimism either. Not only does the title smack of some experiment to create a footballing master race, the way in which it allows the top teams to cherry pick any promising youngster from any of the "lesser" ones, and to do it for a pittance, will only exaggerate the gap between rich and poor. The proposals only got through because the poor were so desperate for the £70,000 each they receive in "solidarity payments" - there's a misnomer for you - that they had to agree, a bit like the condemned man agreeing to be beaten up as well as hung just so long as he could get an aspirin in between courses. What the long term consequences of this deal are can only be guessed at, but the shrewd money is on it driving lower league youth football into the dirt.

And then we have the wise words of Barcelona president Sandro Rosell who has called for the major European leagues to be reduced to 16 teams so that those pesky domestic leagues can be played under lights on a Tuesday and the proper stuff, the European games, can take centre stage on a Saturday afternoon. Richard Scudamore, the Premier League's Chief Executive, reacted quickly to dismiss the idea out of hand, but after all these years where the Premier League has been in control, you have to wonder if he is stuck in the same position as those Football League executives were in the late 1980s, pushing furiously against the tide and cursing the fact that they'd forgotten to bring a boat.

For the forces of money - ie the forces of Manchester, Madrid, Barcelona, Turin, Paris, Moscow, Munich and Milan - are inexorable. They do not take no for an answer, and Rosell doesn't even want to listen to an argument: "We want a bigger Champions League and hope one day we could play perhaps Barcelona versus Manchester United on Saturdays. It's something all of them would have to agree to. That includes the Premier League. We want to have the Champions League under the UEFA umbrella but we want UEFA to hear our demands. We would like to have a Champions League with more teams. If UEFA and the ECA reach an agreement then that's good for both parties. If not, with or without the UEFA umbrella, the ECA is entitled to organise their own champions' competition by themselves. In the worst case scenario, we will go away from UEFA".

Perhaps his argument will fall on stony ground. Or perhaps it was just his turn to articulate an idea already well formulated in the boardrooms of the big. For be in no doubt, those mega clubs are quite willing to dispense with UEFA, an organisation they see as nothing more than a nuisance, one which dabbles in their affairs, spirits their players away to those irritating international tournaments and is now trying to tell them how much money they can spend. The Financial Fair Play concept is a particular bone of contention because these clubs argue it's their party and they'll borrow if they want to. When Manchester City can run up a loss of nearly £200million in one year, you can only ask how can they ever qualify under the Financial Fair Play rules? And with an owner who, when he needs a few more quid to buy somebody else has only to switch an oil well on for an extra hour, why should they? Football has long since sold its soul to money, so why should City be penalised for following things to their logical conclusion? The fact that there is talk of UEFA changing the penalties from expulsion from European competition to a system of fines is particularly telling, suggesting they realise just how hard it's going to be to hold this construction together, but it also makes them laughable. Is there a big enough fine in the world to deter Manchester City or Chelsea at this point?

Just where this ends is unclear. Will we have a breakaway Superleague operating under its own auspices on a European scale a la the Kerry Packer cricket circus of the 1970s? Or will the domestic leagues submit and reorder their own affairs in order to try and hold things together just a little longer, perhaps, in our case, by sugaring the pill by creating Premier League Two, possibly with no relegation, perhaps with a split of 16 clubs in the top flight and 24 in the second tier? Such is the impact of the financial imperatives, it is hard to see that the game as it stands will endure through a decade where football's immunity to the cold winds of economic hardship beyond its gates will be called into sharper and deeper question than ever before. Change is surely going to come, and for some it will be extremely painful and may even sound the death knell.

Professional football has been central to the social tapestry of this nation for well over a century. If you were starting out today, maybe you wouldn't have 92 league clubs and all that entails. But it's what we have and it means something. In some corners of the country, it means everything. Would we ever have heard of Accrington if it hadn't been for Stanley? What of Oldham, Gillingham? Crewe would just be a place with a lot of trains. Even now, they don't really inhabit the same world as Arsenal, the links across the divisions that were so strong 30 years ago having largely perished. But there is still some vague semblance of solidarity which makes the national game a truly cohesive force, as we will see again in January on third round day when the FA Cup brings the mighty and the minnows together.

But enjoy it while it lasts. This game may not be here forever.