Premier League clubs aren't bothered about producing home-grown talent to assist England, it doesn't make good business

Red is the colour: Liverpool players dominated England's starting line-up at the World Cup but what worth does the Premier League club get out of their appearances and caps?

Supporting England at major tournaments is a bit like using out-of-date milk from the fridge. You do it more out of convenience than anything else; it feels fine at first, but ultimately leaves you slightly queasy, and with nobody to blame but yourself.

Of course, people rarely enjoy blaming themselves, so the search for scapegoats begins. Roy Hodgson, obviously: sack him first. Sack Greg Dyke too. In fact, the entire Football Association can safely be sacked. Sack all the grass-roots coaches and replace them with nutritionists from Clairefontaine. Now to the players, and clearly Steven Gerrard must be sacked immediately. In fact, sack everybody over the age of 20, make Raheem Sterling manager and rebuild for Russia 2018 with a team of hungry adolescents. They play without fear, you know.

At which point, of course, the ritualistic bloodletting would probably encounter its first clot. It is interesting, for example, to see what happened in late 2010, the last time England responded to a World Cup debacle by clamouring for youth. One look at the under-21 squad that autumn reveals a strong leaning towards one club in particular. Among the mainstays of that side were Michael Mancienne, Jack Cork, Daniel Sturridge, Ryan Bertrand, Scott Sinclair, Josh McEachran. If English football was mining another golden generation, clearly Stamford Bridge was the place to start digging.

Now, we can argue back and forth about how good some of these players actually were. What is indisputable is that the number of them who became mainstays at Chelsea can be comfortably counted on the fingers of no hands.

Sturridge flourished for half a season under Andre Villas-Boas before being buried again in a fresh drift of signings. The rest either lost patience and left, or remain on the interminable loan treadmill. More recently, you can throw in the likes of Patrick Bamford and Nathaniel Chalobah. With a little faith and a little foresight, Chelsea's academy could have been an England production line. Instead, it is where the promise of youth goes to die.

The words of Luiz Felipe Scolari, Chelsea manager from 2008-2009, are instructive. "We agreed to use more players from the youth squads," he remembered. "When I arrived, they told me there was plenty of quality there. But there wasn't. The staff kept telling [Roman] Abramovich that the Chelsea Academy was the world's best. This was deception!"

So perhaps Chelsea are to blame for England's failure. Except that they are not alone by any means. Tottenham have not produced a first-team regular since Ledley King, and only realised Andros Townsend was any good when he went to QPR. West Ham, once the Academy of Football, appear to have remodelled themselves as the Academy of Ex-Footballers' Sons, with Elliot Lee, George Moncur and Dan Potts all taking turns to be ignored by Sam Allardyce.

In fact, it is a similar story across the board. The question to ask yourself is this: in whose interest is it to develop and nurture young English players? While you consider that, bear in mind that the UK has more billionaires per capita than any other country in the world. We'll come back to that later.

To the question at hand, then. You might say the FA, and you would be right. In 2010, the they produced a report called "The Future Game": an attempt to outline a standard English footballing philosophy that all coaches at all levels could follow: a national blueprint for the game, based on hard pressing and high intelligence. The following year, the Premier League initiated the Elite Player Performance Plan, which was a particularly elaborate way of saying "Nah, screw that". Individual clubs, it said, should be free to create their own philosophy, independent of everyone else.

Can you guess which vision is winning out? A clue: the FA turned over £299 million in the 2012/13 season and employ zero footballers. The Premier League clubs have a combined revenue of £2.7 billion and employ all the good footballers. And they have made it clear upon which side their bread is buttered. "If you're going to be a global business you can't be inconsistent: either Britain is open for business or it isn't," Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore told this newspaper last month.

"If you want to do business abroad, you've got to be prepared for people to come and do business here."

In whose interest is it to develop young English players? Not the Premier League's. Their job is simply to showcase the best players, wherever they came from and however they developed. So perhaps the Premier League are to blame for England's failure. But that would be to ignore the very cultural fabric upon which it is founded.

Let us beat around the bush no longer. If the fact that England are not very good at football bothers you, then it is no use blaming Richard Scudamore or Roman Abramovich or swapping Phil Jagielka with John Stones.

Your real beef is with market capitalism. Or, at least, the sort of unfettered, carnivorous capitalism in which this country has been engaged for perhaps the last 30 years, and of which the unfettered, carnivorous Premier League is only a symptom.

Back to those billionaires. London has more than any other city, and yet most of them are non-domiciles who pay little or no tax. Under Margaret Thatcher, and then under everybody else, this country decided to tear down the gates and convert itself into a theme park for the world's super-rich.

We made our main business, business. Top-rate tax came down, loopholes were allowed to flourish, regulation was ripped up, and wealthy foreigners were actively encouraged to come and buy things. That is the economic model that has underpinned this country for a generation; the Premier League has simply followed it to the letter.

As incongruous as it might seem, the reason Josh McEachran cannot get a game for Chelsea is the same reason most Londoners are unable to buy property in their own city. Market forces have run amok, to an extent unseen in any other country. Unlike in Germany, any venture capitalist can buy a football club with its own money. Unlike in Spain and Italy, there are no restrictions on non-EU players. Unlike in France, top-rate tax is temptingly low. Unlike in the United States, there are no salary caps or drafts. You could scarcely create more favourable conditions for billionaire-ball if you tried, and there are plenty of people trying.

And here is the thing: deep down, you already know all this. Perhaps this explains why this biennial cycle of recrimination takes on such a bitter flavour. We knew the milk was off. It is hardly the supermarket's fault that we put it in our tea anyway.