IS IT any surprise the national team halter when money is only flaunted high up in the English game?
Headlines of England Failure have recurred in recent times, with the European Under-21 Championship disaster the latest. On the other hand, nations of Spain and Germany continue to dominate the winning skyline.
Why is this you may be asking? The solution is simple; the conveyer-belts of talent accumulated sprouted from investment in grassroots football.
To put Spain's success of three of the last major tournaments down to "luck" for example is purely naïve.
This is not even a country of rich international pedigree, in terms of the fact they collected no silverware between 1964 and 2008; they were even branded as "the underachievers" – now a tag that can be accredited to the England team.
Yet Spain took the beautiful game by the scruff of the neck and carefully engineered grassroots investment to have 77 per cent of Spanish League players available for national selection.
The contrasting statistic for England is 40 per cent, which shows how a propensity to import players has certainly given home football a boot in the face.
People suggest that the new centre at Burton is a step in the right direction, on the basis of examples such as France, where the building of the Clairefontaine facility sparked the successes of the French national team in the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000 in theory.
However, there has to be much more to it than to have just put up a £105-million infrastructure with the hope that this will bring instant rewards to performance (and not to whine but at cost to taxpayers again!)
It is OK having "housing for all 24 England teams, from juniors to seniors", but St George's Park will struggle unless money gets through to grassroots.
At the end of the day, this complex is for players once they have broken into the England set-up and surely concentration should be on creating top youngsters in the first place, to then cater using the Staffordshire site?
For example, players in the Grimsby area wouldn't give England a better crop if money in Grimsby grassroots hadn't increased.
Therefore, if more money was filtered to grassroots, better players can be developed from an early age, and a dynasty of winners can be manufactured in the process.
Furthermore, money ought to filter down because of the improvements grassroots requires. Developing players on December days on torrential turf on pitches far too long for the average 11-year-old, for example, is like taxing Lionel Messi; it's highly ineffective! This is at the same time as facilities such as Clee Fields Astroturf rotting to absolute waste. Although the FA is changing the laws for under-11 football and below, imagine the positive externalities of the government of agreeing to repair potential pitches.
I may have barked at the government in my last article, which even prompted some to suggest I should run against Mr Cameron in the next General Election! Nevertheless, I do not blame the Government for the lack of funding, as Mr Cameron has more to concentrate on than football and hence he leaves the game in the arms of other "professionals". Even if the government directly injects money, it is what football does with it that counts.
This ties into me also shunning the blame off the players themselves, too, because who is really going to turn down such ludicrous sums of money in this day and age?
The problem lies with those who fund monstrous wages, and therefore the Premier League needs to assume some responsibility for lack of filtering.
For as entertaining as it is, the league has hatched English players hungrier for a pricy lifestyle, rather than an appetite for footballing success.
What is certain is that little funds reach the heart and soul of where football begins for many.
English football needs to remember its roots as the inventors of the beautiful game. Football is a sport for all classes and many great players are from poor backgrounds.
More funding lower down can only promote those with ability first off. Are riches for the minority necessary, or are adequate funds for the majority?