When Wentworth’s golfers heard this week that they would have to pay a fee of ￡100,000 or lose their membership of the ancient English club, many were shocked. They should not have been. The demand from Wentworth’s new Chinese owners expresses a contemporary truth, in sport as well as beyond: everything glorious is being taken over by the 1 per cent.

Money began pouring into European sport only in the 1990s, when commercial television magnates Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi discovered the lure of live action. Football, previously considered violent, grubby and working-class, benefited most. Stadiums were spruced up. Ticket prices rose, and in many provincial towns, the lounge of the local football club on match day replaced the Rotary Club as the gathering-place of the town’s businesspeople. In 2000, these new fans became known as the “prawn sandwich brigade”, after Manchester United’s then captain, Roy Keane, complained that the club’s home crowds were too busy scoffing said sandwiches to follow the game.

Today it is more of a caviar-blini brigade: after the gentrification of the 1990s, we are now seeing the plutocratisation of sport. This is not because sport has become big business. While Real Madrid last month declared annual revenues of €660.6m, the highest of any club in any sport in history , in terms of revenues it is only a mid-ranking business.