More on Chelsea at : "Arsenal, Chelsea - and the British game that Manchester United strive to keep"

Even Roman Abramovich admits it - there is too much money flying around English football and  it’s time to pull the plug. In a frank interview with the Observer newspaper, Chelsea’s sugar daddy says he is going to invest money in the club's Academy to bring youngsters through rather than pay inflated prices for the so-called best of European talent.

He may have woken up a tad late to save the massive dosh he has wasted on the likes of Andriy Shevchenko, Michael Ballack and Shaun Wright-Phillips, to name but three of the designer labels which have not shown themselves as good buys. But what’s a few million to Abramovich, anyway? You can all be sure of one thing; without daddy’s money to spend, spend, spend, dear old Jose Mourinho will be looking for another rich foster home elsewhere.

Look at what has become of our beautiful game – bungs, sky-high wage deals, exorbitant ticket prices and merchandise and a lousy national team to boot. With the greatest respect to Ballack, undoubtedly a class act, surely he only opted for south-west London in preference to a renewed contract at Munich to avoid paying the German higher rate of tax. Here in blighty, with its relaxed laws about offshore accounts, Ballack can pay a top accountant to siphon his hard-earned millions to Bermuda or the like. If I were Ballack, I know what I would do, so good luck to him.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing bad about people with talent being rewarded for their skill - and the market simply reflects the demand and supply. But how do you actually judge if a player is worth the money? In industry, the company earns billions and the CEO earns millions – perfectly reasonable. In tennis, Roger Federer earns millions as a one-man company, again good luck to him. But football is a team game, so how can we possible quantify whether Shevchenko and Cristiano Ronaldo are the catalysts for Chelsea and Manchester United’s success? You can’t, because in any one game, never mind 38 in a season, the other ten players will have contributed their fair share to the success of the team. Abramovich has not made billions from being naïve. He is sharp and he has woken up to an important fact – Academies are the way forward.

Manchester United realised this and from the early 1990s a raft of brilliant young players like Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, John O’Shea, David Beckham and Nicky Butt (to name but a handful), came through to grace English football. So it should be, and will be, with Chelsea. Interestingly, the Australian cricket squad faces a similar problem now as their conquering stars get older - and they may pay the price for not bringing in the talented kids earlier.