MY MOTHER told me to never trust a man with a messianic complex and a bright orange face. She passed away long before Simon Jordan made his millions but her advice still seemed sound, until this week. Now, however, we might have to rethink. The bumptious Crystal Palace chairman, who resembles a Belisha beacon in wrap-around shades, has been speaking a lot of sense. He is thinking of giving up the game altogether, not because he has decided that actually he loathes Crystal Palace, which to my mind would be eminently understandable, but because he is “disillusioned” with the business side of football. Well, you and me both, mate - but Jordan’s latest complaint is more specific and few could disagree with him (apart from the people who administer the game, of course).

Palace run a very good and extremely expensive youth academy into which Jordan has “poured millions” of his own money. By the chairman’s own estimate, approximately one boy out of 100 will eventually come good (the rest, he might have added, are sent on loan to Millwall, where they are cheerfully kicked into retirement). In 16-year-old John Bostock, Jordan had found that one in 100 - a gifted athlete who, all seemed to agree, was destined for international football. But then along came Tottenham Hotspur and bought the kid for £700,000 - a fee stipulated by a Football League tribunal - or, in Jordan’s words, “the price of a packet of crisps”.

You do the maths: that £700,000 would not pay for Palace’s academy for four months. And so you wonder what the incentive is for the smaller clubs to bother with academies at all; they are simply a drain on resources that will never be recouped. Jordan is not alone in his anger at the Bostock ruling. The whole business infuriated the Premier League's most thoughtful chairman, Steve Gibson of Middlesbrough. Boro have an extraordinarily successful youth academy that has produced, over the years, the likes of Stewart Downing, David Wheater and Lee Cattermole, so there is an element of self-interest, I suppose, when Gibson says: “It’s an absolute disgrace. The Football League are (sic) guilty of betraying the very clubs and the very people they are supposed to protect.” But he is surely right. Also weighing in on the side of Jordan is Neil Warnock - yes, okay, I know, very few arguments are clinched when the phrase “and what’s more, Neil Warnock supports me in this!” is uttered.

The Football League may mumble that £700,000 seems about right for a player who has yet to be tested at Premier League level (Bostock has already turned out for Crystal Palace), but they cannot find refuge in the laws of the market when they have set the price themselves; and the price they have set is typically short-termist. Bostock may have been a gamble for Spurs, but less of a gamble, and with a much better chance of a return on the investment, than Marcelo Moreno, for example, who they were reputed to be chasing for four million quid, or another supposed target, Eric Bekoe, who plays his football for Asante Kotoko of Ghana. As has often been noted, the world of football rarely adheres to the economic laws that govern the rest of the planet, but in this case it is stark: is Dimitar Berbatov, as an investment, really worth 43 John Bostocks? What is the long-term view?

These are tough times for the 72 league clubs nestling somewhere below Hull City in the football scheme of things. Most hover forever on the cusp of administration, at risk of swingeing penalties - deducted 10 points here, 30 points there - if they fall into bankruptcy. Last season oblivion beckoned for at least four Football League clubs. The effect of the points penalties is to shove them even closer to a state of nonexistence - would you bet on Luton Town existing three or four years from now? Of course clubs should be well-run and well-managed and be financially prudent, but the Football League might do its best to help them achieve this sunlit upland, rather than seemingly trying at every juncture to close them down. The league may believe there are too many football clubs and that a sort of Darwinian pruning is in order, but the strength of the British game lies not in the bejewelled likes of Manchester United and Chelsea, no matter how successful those clubs might be.

It lies in its breadth and depth, upon clubs rooted in their local communities and which draw and attempt to develop young players from within those communities. It is in everyone’s interest that British football should be as broad and diverse as possible; that way, a constant stream of young players will come through.

There are quite a few clubs that have considered shutting down their youth academies or, at the least, downgrading them, including, as it happens, my own club, Millwall. When your bank balance is forever in the red, the youth academy seems a wilful and profligate waste of money, with no prospect of an adequate return - and it seems this way precisely because of the sort of decision that took John Bostock to Tottenham Hotspur for just £700,000.