Frank Lampard has done nothing wrong but is still hated by some – just because he is perceived to be middle class

The fallout from Englands's uncharacteristically limber and frisky Euro 2012 qualifying victories has been rousing. Buoyed by the successes of some new faces there has been a call for a culling of senior personnel. John Terry has been fingered as among those most likely to be cast aside like an outdated combine harvester. And Frank Lampard has also attracted his share of finger-jabbing enmity, as he always seems to, a function of the still-vital ambient phenomenon of Lampard-hate. Poor old Frank: a career two-club man who runs hard and scores goals and is polite and articulate and well-groomed but for some reason is still, as has become obvious again this week, widely pigeon-holed as a git.

I have my own theory as to why Lampard has attracted this kind of treatment, right from the swell of inarticulate outrage that surrounded him as teenager at West Ham United. Ancient fault-lines are in play, a scabrous irritation that seems likely to become more prominent as football continues its generational making over and primping up. Lampard, you see, is middle class. Or at least, he is perceived dimly to be middle class: and middle classness is the game's last great taboo, a social grouping that in football circles is employed as a term of unambiguous abuse, as though being middle class is in itself evidence of loyalty-shortfall and backbone-absence and fundamental personality-castration; rather than simply indicating a middling education, an urge to say "thanks cheers" at least four times during any basic retail transaction and the likelihood at least one of your parents is a genial history teacher.

The first thing to say about this is that Lampard isn't really very middle class. He went to public school. He has a GCSE in Latin. But still, I doubt he feels a bracing hair-shirt cultural obligation to listen to Radio 4, or that he has ever dutifully pretended to be really into reggae, or that, confronted by a builder fixing something in his kitchen, he finds himself hanging around engaging in awkward and forced jocularity before eventually retreating wracked with self-immolating embarrassment.

I recently did some research into the issue of middle-class footballers, however, and Lampard is still widely seen as the Premier League's stand-out off. There are other anecdotal candidates. James Milner went to private school; Gareth Barry's children are called Oscar and Freya; and, best of all, Michael Owen lives in a country manor house, which, rather than transforming into a pastiche of the Las-Vegas-Jacobean style, he has restored in meticulous period detail – meticulously restored period detail being the crack cocaine of the middle classes.

This is still an uncomfortable topic. There are those who will be outraged by the mere mention of middle classness in these pages, and plenty who will boisterously assert their own existence beyond its sickly pall. But the moth-eaten armature of the class system is still with us, still lurking horribly like some inherited mahogany dresser. Class is the ancestral skeleton at the heart of football's oldest, and enduring, divide, the 1875 parting of the ways between the public schools and the Football Association. The lines have always been a little blurred: middle-class people have continued to follow football and there have always been undercover middle-class players. Martin Keown, for example, seems unusually discursive and chatty, his punditry style reminiscent of a niggly and obstructive provincial party wall surveyor. I suspect him of concealing a working middle classness behind the public beard of his gorgeously rustic face. Of the current crop Owen Hargreaves is often described as "different" in much the same way theatrical stars of the 1950s who appeared unusually close to their mothers were opaquely bandied about as "confirmed bachelors". Hargreaves, I suspect, has a basic proficiency in an outmoded musical instrument, perhaps the bassoon or the oboe. He may have once attempted to cook paella.

There is a sense of purely sporting frustration attached to all this. It has been said that only the British carve up their sports by class; and that a fully integrated team of, say, Terry Butcher types and David Gower types would be an irrepressible blend of yodelling bone-headed brawn and wafty, eyebrow‑raising inspiration. Other nations, we believe – with their "technique" and their academies and their professors – do not suffer in this way. They integrate. They compliment. They are free to make expansive gestures and talk about books without being afraid that somebody is going to get them in headlock in the showers.

Like most class assumptions, this is no doubt another fallacy – just like the one about Frank Lampard being middle class. He's much too wealthy and too focused for that. If anything his embedded – and also unjustified – unpopularity is based around something new, the confluence in a single footballer of a residue of old-style class-fury with the modern agonies of celebrity-envy and the new monied overclass. It is a heady cocktail. But still, perhaps in the throes of Lampard-fury, football and its increasingly emboldened middle classes might have finally found something they can agree on.