Supporting the elite's right to grab the best young stars might sound like campaigning for Dracula to be appointed head of the national blood transfusion service, but in the understandable howl from many smaller clubs two issues have become confused. The Football League's right to life ought to be compatible with England's need to manufacture more footballers with the technical dexterity of Xavi Hernández, Mesut Ozil, Luka Modric or David Silva.
English football is the working-class Wimbledon, with Wembley as Centre Court: a spectacle of great opulence that fails year after year to produce players of world-class skill. The expectation lumped on Jack Wilshere and Phil Jones is the clearest evidence of barrenness in the most important field, where Spain, Germany and Holland have dedicated themselves to the cultivation of artists rather than artisans.
At first reading the Premier League's blitz on the 90-minute travelling time restriction and on compensation to smaller clubs was an asset-grab, backed up with blackmail – the withholding of part of its annual "solidarity payment", pending the Football League's vote on the proposed elite player performance plan (EPPP). Vote for us or starve, the tactic seemed to say.
The instinct to defend the 72 against the 20 is as legitimate as the cries of the 99% against the 1% in society and politics. Polarisation is our national story, and it should be resisted, in the economy and football. But the move to raise standards is legitimate, as we all know from watching England at World Cups. We can no longer lacerate the eternal quarter-finalists if we then deny that Spain and Germany are streets ahead in the coaching of schoolboy players.
An expert in Crewe Alexandra's finances made contact to say the EPPP would kill that great beacon club "within three years". Lavish transfers for under-16s are dead, to be replaced by annual compensation terms and additional payments based on first-team appearances and sell-on fees. The best lower league academies will retain category one status so long as they can stump up an annual budget of £2.3m and 18 full-time staff. Few will.
Ultimately this tussle has come about in the first place because the Premier League pulled away from the rest of football. Upstairs Downstairs is its unofficial motto. Plainly many elite clubs resent spending £1m on a 15-year-old who then fails to measure up. The pity is that some clubs are condemned to survive by trying to spot a local Messi and selling him to a top-20 operation.
This is a kind of poverty trap. The club sells the one good player to pay the wages of 10 ordinary ones. Its academy is not there to provide first-team heroes but to unearth a gem it can hawk. The board's mismanagement is concealed by the talent drain. Crystal Palace supporters have seen their club mishandled and many of their best youngsters auctioned off to pay the bills. There must be a better way.
These proposals – forced through by the Premier League but supported by the Football League and Football Association – lack imagination. There are all sorts of other ways for the 20 to support the 72 without overpaying for teenagers. The objective should be wealth redistribution – but not denying Manchester United or Chelsea the extra coaching hours they want on the training ground.
A couple of ideas: any player taken from a Football League club at 16 or under then discarded by that bigger team cannot be sold for a transfer fee back to the 72. That way, Championship, League One and League Two clubs will have access to free talent returning from the highest echelon. Equally when a youngster is seized the Premier League club is obliged to send on loan to that feeder club at least one player of reserve-team calibre or above. What Crystal Palace and Crewe want, naturally, is hard cash, and they should get it, through wealth redistribution, in many forms – not by asserting an automatic right to keep a boy until he can be sold for the best possible price.
"We are only allowed to coach [schoolboys] for an hour and a half a day. Barcelona can coach every hour of the day if they want and that's a great advantage they have got," Sir Alex Ferguson says. Most Premier League academies – and certainly the FA – are failing to match the standards of other European countries. So they have much to prove, before they start ordering Crewe to hand over the goods for £40,000 a year in compensation.
Somewhere in there, though, is a worthwhile aim: to educate the best young players as well as they are in those countries that send England packing at tournaments. If in doubt consider the panic over Wayne Rooney's three-match suspension for Euro 2012. There is an embarrassing dependence on one player.