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I had the same conversation with a friend, and we agreed that soccer lost its romance, from expensive tickets and merch, to the machine players trying to break records and score goals. If we can't afford a ticket, why even a watch your team play?
It's not only UK, but all over Europe.
I believe it's less of an issue the smaller the league is. Already in the Dutch league I feel like I can still afford the price of admission and the spectacle is still solid with full stadiums and generally good atmosphere. If even that level is still too commercialised, I recommend giving your local village team a visit. It's usually a blast and the "Bratwurst" at the matches here in the Verbandsliga Südhessen is very affordable.
I used to have a Villa season ticket but I just gave up when the number of matches being moved from 3pm Saturdays meant I had to dedicate entire long weekends for an entire season as to when a match could be moved to, thanks to TV. Its gotten even worse now for Villa as we are the joint 4th highest for TV selection, its actually pretty damn rare for us to have a game at 3pm Saturday.
Couple that with frankly insulting Champions League ticket prices (around £90 for the Holte plus travel and parking), it just makes it too expensive to go regularly now even with cherry picking matches. I could go away as thats been cheaper tickets, but cost of travel and the even bigger time commitment at random days of the working week just make it unachievable. If you don't maintain your away booking record you end up at the bottom of the booking queue and when the likes of Club Brugge have only 1400 away tickets shit like that matters.
Its kind of tough thanks to PSR that the clubs budget was considerably less than the established clubs we competing against, and we have to increase income so I understand why its gone up even if I don't agree with its impact to fans.
The one good thing about being a fan of an MLS team is that we are less exploited. We're still exploited, mind you, especially in the ticket price discussion; but at least they aren't holding MLS games in London or Berlin. It's also nice that MLS TV broadcast is included as part of season ticket prices (and is relatively cheap in general if you aren't a STH).
The bad thing for MLS is that the spending cap makes ANY amount of exploitation suck because fans don't at least get the benefit of a better team out of it. My team is the most valuable with the highest priced tickets and most merch sold, but we can't dump more money in better players to enhance our squad.
Although I don't know MLS, your description could also be true when considering smaller European leagues. As a Dutchman I somewhat follow the Dutch Eredivisie. There we have a generally well developed fan culture, full stadiums with good atmosphere and several teams challenging for the title all while not being skinned alive as English fans often are.
And there won't be talks of Dutch teams having regular season games in the US, like in La Liga.
Haha! We had one supercup in 2021 that was played in Tel Aviv of all places for some reason. Well, at least the league has promised never to do anything like that again after some serious backlash.