Outside the Emirates stadium, as Arsenal prepared to take on Sunderland on the first day of the new Premier League season, the shining, freshly minted memories of the Olympics were still on some people's minds.
"The spirit was fantastic," said Jerry Kent, an Arsenal season ticket holder who attends matches with his wife, Marie, and two young boys, Seb and Archie. "We come to Arsenal and it's great, but I would never take these boys to an away match. It's too aggressive. I think we can learn a lot from the Olympics."
Almost unheralded, football is back. Across the country, old rituals were resumed, scarves and replica shirts donned and a familiar sense of optimism was in the air. But as the new campaign got under way and rivalries were renewed, the national sport appeared to have lost the cocksure swagger that usually accompanies the self-styled "best league in the world".
The life-affirming spirit of the Olympic Games, celebrated as a spectacle of selfless, uplifting sportsmanship, has cast a large shadow over a game too often associated with outrageous salaries, gamesmanship and snarling exchanges. The country is in the mood for more Bradley Wiggins-style humility and less John Terry-type brashness.
Ever conscious of the status of the Premier League brand, Richard Scudamore, the league's chief executive, told the BBC Today programme on Saturday that a sermon on good behaviour would be delivered to top-flight players next month: "We'll be talking to all the players," said Scudamore. "We'll get them all together again in September – the 20, the club captains and the PFA [Professional Footballers' Association] representatives – and we will talk to them about what we can do."
The idea that football may need to clean up its act when it comes to player dissent and other less savoury aspects of the "beautiful game" was echoed by Richard Bevan, head of the League Managers Association. "It's up to everybody in the game," said Bevan. "When you consider the game is reaching 720m households around the world, the amazing success that comes with that is obviously creating responsibility. Our focus will be on discipline, it will be on supporting the Premier League and FA to get on with the game and the Respect [fair play] programmes. And there is a new focus. Certainly, from the pre-season meetings we saw a lot of good talk about sportsmanship rather than gamesmanship."
Not everyone in the football world is inclined to put on the post-Olympics sackcloth and ashes, however. Malcolm Clarke is chairman of the Football Supporters' Federation, a national organisation that has campaigned, among other things, for "safe standing" areas in football stadiums. He took a more balanced view of the vices and virtues of a sport that, only last May, delivered one of the most exciting climaxes to any season, when Manchester City pipped Manchester United to the league title in the last minutes of the last day. Clarke pointed out that football is subjected to an unparalleled level of scrutiny: "Most sports don't have that focus. I think if they did, they'd find it quite hard to live up to those Olympic ideals."
Clarke was also keen to point out the positive stories that he believes go largely unreported, such as the Premier League's well-developed community programme, in which all clubs participate, and the philanthropic efforts of individual footballers. He cited as an example the Sport4Charity organisation set up by the Senegalese international and Stoke player Salif Diao, which has similar aims to the Mo Farah Foundation.
Where Clarke thinks that football can improve and strengthen its relationship with the public is in its treatment of supporters. The match-going fans, he said, have seen little benefit from the vast amount of money that has gone into the top level of the game; instead, they have had to endure ticket price increases that are "excessive and absurd".
But according to Mark Perryman, football activist and author of Why The Olympics Aren't Good For Us And How They Can Be, it is not the season-ticket holders who go to games week in, week out who are the key to understanding the challenges that football faces after London 2012. The vast increase in football's popularity after the World Cup in Italy in 1990 brought an immense amount of money into the game but, Perryman argues, it was the sport's peripheral audience that has contributed most to the coffers, through incidentals such as corporate hospitality and replica shirt sales. It is that audience, he reckons, which might be tempted to switch its interest to sports such as cycling.
"What will also be interesting over the next 12 months is what will happen to endorsement contracts," said Perryman, suggesting that they were more likely to go to Jessica Ennis or cyclist Laura Trott than Premier League footballers.
Perryman pointed out that the positive story about football in the Olympics came out of the women's game, which boasted record levels of interest. "What I'd like to see," he said, "is the FA bid for the women's World Cup in 2019." Next year, he added, the FA would celebrate its 150th anniversary. Attempting to stage a major women's tournament would show that "a very solid lesson" had been learned.
Meanwhile, a new financial ethic could be imposed on the domestic game, with the introduction of financial fair play regulations. From the 2013-14 season, all clubs in Europe will have to be able to demonstrate that they are breaking even in order to be allowed to compete in Uefa competitions – with calculations made on the basis of their accounts from this season and the last.
The aim is to ensure that clubs' spending is undertaken on the basis of legitimate commercial activity, rather than injections of cash from super-wealthy owners, but there have already been doubts expressed as to how effective the rules will be, with sceptics citing the £400m deal for naming rights that Manchester City struck last year with Etihad Airlines.
The losses sustained by many of the big-spending clubs – including Manchester City and Chelsea – would not comply with Uefa's definition of financial stability, but question marks remain over how realistic it would be for the organisation to impose penalties on such high-profile teams.
Meanwhile, both the powers-that-be and the clubs themselves seem aware of the need for some image enhancement as the country continues to bask – however rose-tinted their spectacles might be – in the glow of the Games.
Those practised in the art of communication got going before the Games even started: Karren Brady's open letter to Londoners, two days before Danny Boyle's curtain-raiser, saw the vice-chairman of West Ham United bolster her club's bid to occupy the Olympic stadium by claiming that it was in a strong position to deliver "legacy" – not least because its community sports trust already caters for 17 of the 26 Olympic sports.
Which team will play at Stratford has still to be decided, but Arsenal fans outside the Emirates on Saturday were well aware that a new stadium was not the answer. As they entered their eighth season without silverware, the fans could only hope a change in fortune – perhaps produced by new signings Lukas Podolski, Olivier Giroud and Santi Cazorla – was around the corner. Whatever the debates taking place about the state of the game, a fan's preoccupations always return to results and performances on the pitch.
