Russia's oligarchs helped themselves to the vast state assets of the imploding Soviet Union, so it's no shock to find Roman Abramovich's Chelsea headhunters availing themselves of the fruits of other people's labours at smaller football clubs.

The difference is that Moscow's opportunists seized Soviet industry to amass great fortunes. Here the object is to stem a gushing loss. If Chelsea are the most aggressive of the game's robber barons in European talent markets it is because Abramovich has hammered the break-even mantra into Peter Kenyon (chief executive) and Frank Arnesen, his head of recruitment.

To want Chelsea to be a self-renewing Harvard of cosmopolitan talent is a rational objective. The alternative is to torch £30m every time you have to go to the shops for a new Champions League-class striker. It's not the why, but the how that ignited last week's conflagration involving the Premier League's rich and powerful and committee men who have gazed into Swiss lakes and found inside themselves a deep hatred of "child trafficking" of boys from clubs in France to opulence at Chelsea.

Most of us would agree that young talent should be allowed to develop at the European clubs where it was discovered without the big English clubs inducing it back to London or Manchester. But let's acknowledge the pattern of French clubs, specifically, enlisting the help of Fifa and a French Uefa president (Michel Platini) to bolster bureaucratic rigour in the face of English football's Thatcherite economics.

Two days after Abramovich's outfit were slapped with a ban on signing new players until 2011, the Guardian alleged that Chelsea had last year set up a French 11-year-old called Jérémy Boga and his previously estranged parents in a house in Wimbledon to comply with the Fifa regulation that says international child transfers are permissible only if the parents also move to the new country.

Who said big Premier League clubs have no social conscience? They're even in the marriage guidance business now. "It's sure that Chelsea didn't reunite the family for sentimental reasons", grumbled Robert Caturegli, an official at Marseille, Boga's former club.

Lens, Le Havre and Marseille are all now waving Fifa's laws at English talent-grabbers. "Chelsea didn't imagine Lens could stop a club like Chelsea from recruiting players. But the ban is only the application of the laws we told Chelsea very well would come," said François Collado, the former general manager at Lens. It's plain that French football has sympathetic friends in high places, just as the Premier League has many enemies in Switzerland, where its debt-based, world-conquest model is viewed by many as Beelzebub in a Bentley.

Meanwhile you can the see the competing forces ripping away inside Chelsea. With their wage bill – over £150,000 a week for John Terry is the latest splash-out – they are no more likely to "break even" than rain is to disappear from English summers. Our stupid veneration of the absurdly rich blinds us to the reality that Abramovich is trying to pull off an impossible accounting trick. He wants a zero balance at a club with a £100m-plus wage bill and a much smaller international profile than Manchester United, Milan or Real Madrid.

Hence the manic pursuit of foreign starlets, in which Chelsea are not alone. United no longer kid themselves that a golden generation can be scooped up in greater Manchester alone, as it was in the early 1990s, and nobody would describe the Arsenal academy as Highbury and Islington U-16s. At Liverpool, Rafa Benítez has disenfranchised a rich local tradition by packing the reserves with obscure foreign journeymen.

While paying off managers with reckless abandon and paying top dollar to the likes of Terry, Frank Lampard and Michael Ballack, the Abramovich clan have adopted a parallel tactic of seek-and-lift at academies which happen to be more productive than their own. This policy is known as having it both ways, which is in tune with the owner's character. Abramovich is both yacht-bound mogul and friend of Putin and the Kremlin. He doles out largesse and then lobbies Uefa (so Platini says) to force clubs to spend only what they earn.

Oligarchs are supreme pragmatists, and experts in the mechanics of power, but Abramovich forgot that Fifa and Uefa are still capable of spasms of righteousness, in this case, partly, because Lens wanted more money by way of compensation than Chelsea offered for Gaël Kakuta, and so brought a government down on Arnesen's head.

We all know what happens next. Chelsea will march to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the punishment will be reduced. If they took a liberté, at least égalité has had a better week.

Cameras leave Eduardo out of the picture

According to Artur Boruc, the Celtic goalkeeper who was at Eduardo's feet when he took that extravagant tumble in a Champions League match, there is a saying in Poland: "One minute you're driving the car, the next minute you're under it."

Eduardo knows this well from having his leg mangled by Birmingham's Martin Taylor. Now, the Arsenal striker is under the wheels again with Uefa's retrospective two-match Champions League suspension for diving: a one-off punishment that contradicts football's Luddite disregard for video technology.

In Britain, which is jostling for the title of world's No1 surveillance society, we favour ref-baiting and managerial ranting over calm judicial review. Our football is too manic to stop for 10 seconds to take a closer look in the interests of fairness.

The Boruc line comes from Tom Watt's lavish book, The Beautiful Game, a collection of interviews with top players from across the world about how they fell in love with football in childhood. Boruc learned the game in the lee of one his country's toughest prisons. He also excelled at Polish dancing. All good preparation for the crime and punishment duet.

Five reasons why we were surprised by bloodied Quins

1 Dean Richards served 13 years as a Leicestershire police constable. The "directing mind" behind rugby's fake blood scandal and subsequent lying and cover-up was, he told us in his 1995 autobiography, a conscientious cop: "As a serving policeman I have no time for any officers ... who have changed or fabricated evidence in order to secure a conviction." Good to know he wasn't at it down at the station.

2 Joke-shop capsules, at £3.99, are about as convincing as smashing a bottle of Brouilly in one's mouth. More ingenuity is needed. Expect a Dragon's Den hopeful to offer equity in a firm manufacturing realistic props for the discerning cheat.

3 No substituted player should ever be allowed back on. Clubs can't be trusted to use this dispensation honestly.

4 Injury-simulation might sound less offensive than eye-gouging but Richards's Dracula schtick was an attempt to steal a win. The capsule down the sock, that awful acting by the juice-spewing Tom Williams and the dissembling proved that the more money you throw at a sport the more craven it becomes.

5 "Bloodgate" is the media's 10,000th mis-use of "gate" as a way of saying: "Hey, look over here, we've found a scandal."

Cause of the week

Arsenal supporters were right to turn their cannons on Play.com and Amazon for stocking a compilation of football chants which included the vile "Sit down you paedophile", as directed at Arsène Wenger. This repulsive dirge, which has now been withdrawn by both firms, would be bad enough if it only subjected the Arsenal manager to intolerable abuse. Its other iniquity is to trivialise sexual crimes against children by presenting them as a source of mirth.

At many grounds you wouldn't hold a candle for self-policing, because offensive chanting is endemic. But this week's campaign against laissez-faire retailers was a small start.