In one of the Madden video games they had him saying “You gotta move the ball down the field and score points” as color commentary, and I was like “yeah John, that’s pretty much the most basic possible description of the concept of American football.”

They had been on decline since the Industrial Revolution started shifting the center of wealth generation away from land/agriculture. That was accelerated by the war. Acutely, at least in the UK, paying for the war lead to steep increases in estate taxes that made keeping “great homes” impossible.