There was no mistaking the importance of what was said last week by the chairman of the Football Association, Lord Triesman - who seemed to be inviting us to view the Premier League as a kind of Titanic, sailing blithely ahead with the band playing in the ballroom while vast creaking icebergs of debt close in - or the significance of the dismissive response from the League’s chief executive, Richard Scudamore. It may, therefore, have been perverse to find all those portentous utterances competing for attention in my mind with some quiet words spoken into a microphone far away by Cesc Fabregas.

For some of us, deciding where our sympathies lay in the Triesman-Scudamore exchanges wasn’t a strain. Endorsing the League’s stance had to be difficult after Scudamore said: “I don’t agree that debt is bad. It is inevitable and to a degree it is healthy as long as it is linked responsibly to your income.” His point is arguable but only if his stipulations about degree and responsibility are met. Can that really be consistently the case in his domain if Lord Triesman is accurate when estimating the aggregate debt of the country’s clubs at £3bn? Scudamore is a relentless generator of revenue but he will perhaps forgive those who have trouble interpreting the figure quoted as testimony to the glowing financial health of a sport. There will be a nervous fascination in watching how his lordship’s warnings about dangerous risk levels in the Premier League’s finances play out amid worldwide economic woes that show no sign of being brief.

So how could a 21-year-old player create a magnetic distraction from such momentously relevant speculation on the threat of corporate implosions in football? Fabregas did it simply by talking, albeit vaguely, about the possibility of leaving Arsenal. In doing so he underlined the truism that all the high-pow-ered (and often dubious) business stimulated around the Premier League could not exist without the game’s capacity to draw a romantically blind devotion from a huge and constantly replenished army of customers. The success of the most remarkable franchise in global sport owes much to expert marketing but ultimately the phenomenon cannot be explained as some miracle of commercial acumen. Football was a Klondike waiting to be exploited and its purest gold has always been the hold exerted on countless millions by its greatest talents.

These days there is no elite small enough to exclude Fabregas and concern about a possible departure from these shores would be deep if we could imagine the resultant loss as being confined to his individual brilliance. But, of course, the implications would be far wider.

There might, in fact, be justification for wondering if the Arsenal manager, Arsène Wenger, would be entirely immune to disillusioning effects should Fabregas choose to turn his recent musings into reality by returning to his first professional home, Barcelona.

The visionary policy with which Wenger has so enriched English football for a dozen years, the commitment to producing teams capable of mesmerising opponents into submission, has in the past readily survived major depletions of his squad with optimism intact. Nothing in the record, however, certainly not the transfers of the already fading Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry, could for a moment be compared to the diminishment of performance and of morale likely to be associated with losing Fabregas as he approaches what should be a lengthy prime.

He is much more than overwhelmingly the most gifted player on Arsenal’s books, an established master to Theo Walcott’s thrillingly precocious novice. For his club and for victorious Spain in Euro 2008 (where the limiting of opportunities didn’t obscure the vital worth of his contribution), he has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to unravel the staunchest defences with the kind of repertoire of penetrative skills given, at maximum, to only a handful of midfielders in any generation. And the effortless delicacy of his touch and close control, his alert and deadly eye for openings and the crisp, precisely weighted delivery of his passes are informed by a physical neatness and grace that make the sight of him at work one of the most satisfying in the modern game.

Yet such a list of attributes, even when supplemented by mention of an occasionally fiery competitiveness, doesn’t fully embrace his value to Arsenal. To do that it is necessary to recognise Fabregas as the perfect symbol, the living embodiment of Wenger’s philosophy, of the Frenchman’s glorious refusal to concede that style and artistry need ever detract from effectiveness on the field. Though Roy Keane was typically convincing when he assured us the other day “the word on the football street is that Arsenal have a group of kids coming through who will be absolutely outstanding”, there remains the conviction that the early emergence of anybody to equal Fabregas is improbable.

The best hope for Wenger and all of us who admire his methods is that fears of migratory restlessness in the young Spaniard are premature, and that may well be so. A radio interview in his homeland was bound to besiege him with leading questions and he was hardly liable to speak disparagingly when asked how he would feel about rejoining Barcelona, from whose academy he was amazingly spirited to London as a 16-year-old. Still, the trophy-drought afflicting Arsenal (prize-winning has been beyond them since they lifted the FA Cup in 2005) must be torturous frustration for somebody who knows the most medal-laden of his contemporaries would welcome him as a teammate. He can scarcely be blamed for sounding lyrical about allying himself with Barça’s Lionel Messi, the man he and many of us on the sidelines have long regarded as the finest attacking player in the world. If preventing that reuniting of exceptional talents, and thus retaining the splendours of Fabregas’s game for our own delight, requires the reacquaintance of Arsenal with triumphs, then Arsène Wenger’s men may soon discover they have small islands of allegiance in the unlikeliest places.

Sad kind of drama for Seve

The concern that flows in from all corners of the world to a Madrid hospital this morning conveys far more than the recognition of Seve Ballesteros as the most dramatic golfer who ever swung a club. It testifies to the extraordinary bond of human warmth the great Spaniard’s mixture of boundless genius, fearless risk-taking and fallibility forged with his public in his championship-winning prime. As we wait, amid rumours of a brain tumour, for definitive word on 51-year-old Seve’s condition, the landscape of sport suddenly seems a darker place.

Kazakhstan goalfest flattered England

THE scoreline will suggest a swaggering follow-up to that stylish 4-1 victory in Croatia last month but England’s performance during much of yesterday’s World Cup qualifying match at Wembley amounted to a severe questioning of their assumptions about themselves. Supporters who were belligerently bawling out the national anthem before the finish had earlier struggled to comply with Fabio Capello’s request for an absence of the booing that has so often punctuated England’s efforts on their home turf. And Steve Rider was right when he suggested on ITV that the manager himself may have been tempted to contribute a few catcalls as his team laboured to half-time without producing a single shot on target.

They then failed markedly to build confidence and rhythm on the two goals that gave them what should have been a secure lead soon after the interval. Instead of assurance there was dishevelled edginess and it was the opposition who next had the ball in the net. Those who had suspected Kazakhstan, placed 131 in the Fifa rankings, would be pushed to achieve the competitiveness of training-ground cones had long since been disabused of complacency by players who hustled all over the field as if their lives were at stake. Their German coach, Bernd Storck, had urged them to be positive and, encouraged by England’s uncertainty, they did a thoroughly admirable job of fulfilling his demands. But their commitment was bound to exhaust them and as they wilted they fell victim to a 5-1 slaughter that somewhat flattered its perpetrators. Obviously, the result is healthy and it would be wrong to make too much of the evidence provided by such a fixture. However, Capello is not a man to overlook the shortcomings revealed, both in defence and in attack, by the first hour and more of action. Further proof of the penetrative liveliness of Theo Walcott (at least in the first half) and confirmation of the splendid form of Wayne Rooney, who claimed two goals in the flourishing of late superiority, were the most cheering signals the manager received from the occasion. Of course, he also has that scoreline.