I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but something’s gone a bit funny with money. One moment we were, like the employees of Grace Brothers, all doing very well: next minute we’re all poor. It’s as if a magic wand has been waved over the world, casting a great all-encompassing poor spell.

At once we must look for economies; well, best not cut down on bread and cheese and children’s shoes. Better to economise on works of art, champagne, long-haul travel. Good things, favourite things, but life continues without them.

And sport. As people wonder about that season ticket, that Sky subscription, that trip to South Africa for 2010, so sport begins to panic. Sport is one of the things that everyone can afford to do without. That’s true for ordinary people, for billionaires, for local match-ball sponsors, for multinational companies.

So. All right then. Whither sport? There will certainly be changes – salary cuts, salary caps, closures, receivers, missing sponsors – but sport will also change from within. There is no avoiding this. Recession will force sport into some kind of moral alteration. Sport is in flux before our eyes: what form will it take as the financial changes become a fact rather than a threat?

It seems a lifetime since Allen Stanford was grinning his head off over a chest full of readies, pretending to be cricket’s biggest-ever benefactor. Stanford is now talking about “reviewing” his commitment to cricket less than a year into a five-year deal. Honda has pulled out of Formula One, Subaru from motor rallying.

ITV has dumped the Boat Race from 2010, and Formula One. Vodafone has left Manchester United and is leaving the England cricket team. Liverpool are just one football club in a spin (what will happen if the Royal Bank of Scotland, now part-government-owned, won’t renegotiate their loan?). The Government is cutting back on Olympic funding.

Suddenly, sport is no longer sexy. Suddenly, the gorgeous, pouting minx of sport has found that no one fancies her any more, or at least, they’ve stopping stuffing banknotes down her cleavage. What’s a girl supposed to do in such circumstances?

Sport has for years been sashaying across the world, playing off one admirer against another, utterly confident that there was always plenty more where that came from. Now, with shocking suddenness, everything has changed. Sport’s priorities cannot help but change with everything else. Sport sucked in thousands of people who love money (and such related items as prestige and power and glamour) far more than they ever loved sport. For such people, sport is now infinitely less interesting.

Those who cosied up to football because it is full of consumer-cool, to rugby because it speaks to young middle-class blokes with disposable income, to cricket because of the Asian markets, are finding sport substantially less thrilling than it was a few weeks ago.

There has been a dramatic change in the relationship between sport and money. But if sport is a lot less attractive to people fascinated by money, it is as attractive as ever to people fascinated by mere sport. Sport doesn’t need billions to survive. All it needs is us: people who are stupid enough to care about it.

How will sport cope with this changed landscape, one without the lofty mountains of prestige and the deep valleys flowing with milk and money? Will recession create a new amateurism? Will the outmoded virtues of more austere times come surging back? Will sport create a 21st-century Chariots of Fire.

Er, no. History doesn’t have a reverse gear. The society that produces sport today is radically different from the society that produced Harold Abrahams, Eric Liddell and Lord Lindsay. If sport returns to comparative poverty, it will do so in a 21st-century way. And while for some, the quest for money gets even more desperate than before, for others, not necessarily the rich, there is a highly significant opportunity to relegate money down the hierarchy of priorities.

Inevitably, there will be less emphasis on marketing. We can, if we wish, see this as an opportunity to place more emphasis on excellence. Perhaps a miracle will take place and people who run, say, the England cricket team will stop referring to it as “the product”.

Perhaps, in these straitened times, those who run sport will be forced to consider the possibility that the value of sport is rather different from the price.

In its recent years of head-spinning prosperity, sport has not played hard to get. In fact, it has flung itself on every kerb-crawler like Julia Roberts at the start of Pretty Woman. Every sport in the calendar has done everything it can to sell itself to the moneymen. The penalty shoot-out turns football into a TV game show; cricket is selling the most beguilingly complex sporting form in the world down the river; even modern pentathlon is in the process of destroying itself on the altar of money.

But when sport gets its hands on money, it all goes on fripperies and vanities and one-upmanship: unheard-of salaries, dizzying transfers, Kolpak players, fleets of experts with no comprehensible form of expertise. All that money that has been so briefly a part of sport, and all gone on Cristiano Ronaldo’s hair gel. Sport has rarely spent its own money, preferring to squander it. The money’s come, the money’s going fast, yet sport remains. That’s the point to hold on to. There is a Test match to watch in India, a meaty Christmas programme of football, a new year with the Six Nations and Andy Murray and the Ashes and Usain Bolt.

Money doesn’t create such things. Sport does. Sport’s pursuit of money has been a vast illusion, one based on the false economics of boom-time. Sport will survive, not because it will find more money, but because it can rely on the will of sportingkind. It may even become a more satisfying thing as a result. We won’t see a return to a Golden Age of Corinthianism, but there is an opportunity to see certain things that have for years been hidden by chequebooks and piles of cash and IOUs and goodie bags and freebies.

Some kind of new start is possible. We can stop prizing sport because of the amount of money it makes and start prizing it because of other less readily computable things. If people are no longer in sport for the money, then they must be in it for something else. It would not be a bad idea for everyone in sport to realise this.

If so, we might be spared such things as football agents, the notion that salary is an exact measure of personal worth, Stanford and his box of billions, Formula One’s oil-drunk arrogance, Tiger Woods’s endorsements, the prostration before the gods of television, at least some of the temptation to take drugs. There are certain things that sport can afford to lose.

And the more we lose, the more we realise that what remains is what matters, and what matters is the action, and with it the narrative. What remains, when the accountant has finished his work on the past year in sport, is not the millions gained and the millions lost and the buying and the selling and the earning and the sacking. What remains is Usain Bolt’s run, Rebecca Adlington’s finish, Theo Walcott’s hat-trick, Lewis Hamilton’s last corner, Andy Murray’s touch and the eternally spinning wheels of the Great Britain cyclists.

Yes: it’s recession, and all that sport has left is sport. Is this altogether the disaster the moneymen think it is?