Late in the evening on Tuesday 27th August, it finally happened: after months of threats, possible breakthroughs and false dawns, the English Football League (EFL) were finally forced to expel one of its member clubs, Bury FC.

This was a truly sad end to a long and drawn out saga, the culmination of a series of events that has seen this historic club, founded in 1885, cast from the league setup after 125 years of membership and into almost-certain liquidation. Just a few months ago, in April, the club’s fans, players and staff were celebrating the momentous achievement of promotion from the league’s lowest tier, League 2, to the third rung of the English football ladder, League 1.

However, that promotion itself came in the face of a growing crisis at the club with players and staff reporting unpaid wages dating back to February and the club’s owner buckling under the weight of mounting debts, many of which were leveraged against the club and its assets to meet spiralling interest payments and ongoing commitments.

How the club got into this position is one matter for debate. Punching above its financial weight with player wages reportedly in the same ballpark as clubs two divisions higher, it was evident that this was likely to end in tears, but when that actually happens it’s always the fans that feel the effects worse.

While the club’s owner, whose actions seem to have stymied any potential sale and therefore made survival even more unlikely, will ultimately walk away from the ashes of the team’s Gigg Lane home, it is the supporters who will suffer from the club’s demise the most.

Going to the match is something of a British institution; generations of men, women, boys and girls taking the trip on a Saturday afternoon to follow their team, come rain, wind or shine. Family outings, meeting up with the lads, taking the boy to his first games – all rites of passage for football supporters up and down the country.

That sense of community and importance to the local area is even greater for the nation’s provincial clubs; away from the bright lights of the Premier League, it is our smaller clubs where fans gather, fall in love with their club and build tight-knit networks around their Saturday ritual. You get to know the people who sit around your season ticket seat and share the highs and lows of supporting your team. In many ways, being a fan of a lower league side is much like being a member of a family – there’s a firm sense of togetherness, empathy and loyalty towards the group, looking out for each other and with a much deeper sense of belonging than can be found in many of the global corporation-esque super clubs.

You are an important part of your club and it is an important part of you.

That in itself is the real tragedy in this loss – and it feels like a bereavement: here we have not just the closing of a business, but the cessation of an entity which provides thousands of people with something and somewhere to aspirate their emotions, ambitions and, in many cases, their actual reason for being.

It sounds dramatic to pitch it in those terms, but to many of the supporters of football clubs, it truly is their religion – to have that stripped from their psyche will leave a massive hole.

Apportioning blame in this situation certainly won’t bring the club back but working out how this has been allowed to happen may provide some clues as to how it can be avoided in the future. We live in a world where there are Premier League players sitting inactive on benches earning weekly wages that would keep many a club afloat, but it can’t be their responsibility to fund their colleagues and, ultimately, rivals. They are only being paid what someone is prepared and able to pay them.

The disparity between the top-flight ‘haves’ and the lower league ‘have nots’ continues to grow at an alarming rate, something which feeds the desire to chase success and reach the pot of gold at the end of the footballing rainbow. Achieving promotion to the Premier League can take a club from a position of keeping its head barely above water to profitable sustainability – just ask a recent riser like Bournemouth – but it’s a precarious position that can be taken away just as quickly – see Bolton Wanderers, Portsmouth, Leeds United et al.

Facilitating this kind of survival tightrope is at the heart of the issue. Achieving success and climbing the leagues is so incredibly valuable that clubs – and their owners – will take all kinds of risks in their pursuit of victory at the expense of simple business logic. In what other industry would senior management even consider paying out more that they make?

Unfortunately there can only be a limited number of winners in any season, so for every side that climbs a ladder, there are plenty more who slide down a snake, whether that be in terms of their league status or their ability to balance the books.

In that respect, the EFL have taken a lot of the stick for the demise of Bury with questions over their Fit and Proper Persons test for club owners and the level of control they wield over members’ financial actions. There is only so much that the central body of what is effectively a members’ club can do to police its constituents, but perhaps it is time for firmer governance and greater restriction over finances – even if this threatens to reduce competitivity with Premier League clubs and their fiscal muscle.

In an ideal world, the game’s wealth would be shared far more evenly – does Mesut Özil really need his £350,000 a week and do Manchester United have to spend £98 million on Paul Pogba? If he didn’t and they didn’t, the game at the highest level would hardly wither and die, but without more evenly distributed funds, the chasm that already exists will only expand over time. Eventually that could see more clubs disappear from the system, and there’s even some logic behind an argument to reduce the number of professional clubs in the English game to reduce the financial land-grab that currently exists in the lower leagues.

However, in both these situations, it’s impossible to force the toothpaste back into the tube – Premier League owners, players and agents are hardly likely to donate their earnings for ‘the good of the game’, while asking lower league clubs to become semi-professional or amateur setups would never be a move that could be supported politically by all.

Which kind of leaves us at something of an impasse; with so many stakeholders – Premier League, Football League, Football Association, and the growing power of clubs and players – there exists a huge power vacuum at the top of the game. Who actually runs football in the UK and what are their motives?

There is no single entity or governing body that has the authority to step in and make rulings with the long-term sustainability of the game and its incredibly loyal followers at heart – each organisation with any power has its own agenda, which in turn is dictated by the motivations of its own stakeholders. For instance, the Premier League has to pander to the whims of its clubs, who continue to carry the threat of banding together with Europe’s elite outfits to form a European super league, so anything that could threaten their dominance or profitability is certain to fall on deaf ears.

By its very nature, football is a competitive business – winning, losing, promotion, relegation – but it’s time for that level of tribalism to be diluted for the greater good. Without a more balanced sharing of the game’s eye-watering incomes and a will to create an even playing field, we could well see a wave of clubs going under and eventually drowning beneath unsurmountable debt and over-commitment.