While the rest of the world counts its pennies, football continues to roll around on a bed of £50 notes. Multi-million pound transfers, giant signing fees, six-figure wages (a week, that is). Credit crunch? Not in footballer-belt, where the tills continue to ring up sales of mansions and Bentleys.

Perhaps it is for the riches, perhaps it is out of pure love for the game that millions of small boys up and down the country strive to make the big time. At the Football Association (FA), officials are concerned that the vaulting ambitions of these youngsters – and their parents and coaches – are undermining the process of development.

So appalling is some of the behaviour on the touchlines that the FA, through its Respect campaign launched earlier this year, has felt it necessary to start erecting fences on park pitches to stop parents running on to assault officials – even the children. In a survey in Total Youth Football magazine, 83 per cent of respondents said that they had witnessed “unacceptable verbal abuse or interference from the parents or spectators of a youth football match”. More than 50 per cent had heard adults verbally abusing young players. At the academies, where the elite children learn, clubs have been forced either to exclude parents from training sessions or issue strict rules about watching in silence.

We could interpret this as a sign of how much we care, and no one is doubting our passion. We watch a lot of football, we shout about it a lot. It is so central to our culture that not only footballers but their partners, the ubiquitous WAGs, have become celebrities. Small boys aspire to be Wayne Rooney, girls to be Coleen.

At Crystal Palace, the hand-picked Under 13s train four times a week to try to climb the ladder to sporting stardom; kids like Jonny Winter, whose mother Janine ferries him from their home in Kent. The atmosphere is studious, the parents restrained, although the stereotype of the pushy parent is alive, well and shouting its head off elsewhere around the country.

At Palace’s training ground in suburban Beckenham, they have a role model from even closer to home in the form of John Bostock, an outstanding teen player who headed off to Tottenham Hotspur and the Premier League’s land of plenty this summer. Advised by an agent while he was still a schoolboy studying for his GCSEs last year, Bostock has had a boot deal with Nike since he was just 13. His current wages of £90 a week at Spurs, the standard apprentice’s income restricted by FA rules, will soar to around £3,000 a week as soon as he turns 17 in January.

His dad, Mick, went on a tour to France last year with the England Under 17s and could barely go to the bar without an agent or club scout rushing to buy him a drink. His home phone would ring incessantly. There were inducements along with the blandishments; six-figure sums that would have allowed him to give up his career as a cabbie.

For the families of English kids with notable talent, it is a frenzy for which there is no preparation. One minute Don Walcott was standing on the touchline like any proud dad watching his son, Theo; then suddenly he had hordes of scouts and agents on the phone. “You don’t mind being called once or twice, but it is the fact that some of them don’t take no for an answer,” Don said. “You can say it three, four, five times and they still come back. We didn’t get offered financial inducements, but one agent rang up and invited my wife and me on the next plane to the South of France.” They declined. Theo went on to join Arsenal from Southampton for £9.1 million and travelled with England to the last World Cup at the age of just 17.

No wonder Jonny Winter and the rest of the Under 13s long to follow the trail of Walcott, Bostock and Rooney. If only – and here is the nub – we could be more confident that there will be more English boys to match that talented trio.

As a nation, we are putting in the time and energy to become top-class footballers but something is going wrong, something is breaking down along the conveyor belt of talent. More than half the players in the Premiership are foreigners, a trend that shows so little sign of slowing that the football authorities are talking of quotas to ensure that home-grown teenagers are not totally squeezed out by their rivals from overseas.

Two of our leading clubs, Arsenal and Chelsea, have fielded teams without a single Englishman. Even Barnsley has a couple of Brazilians, not to mention a Jamaican, a Spaniard, a Peruvian, an Argentine and a German. Foreign footballers, like Polish builders, know that England is a country rich with opportunity.

At Palace, the outstanding Under 13 player is Gus Sow, a bow-legged midfield player with a biting tackle. “He’s the best in his age group by a mile, including the kids at Chelsea,” one dad says. “If he doesn’t make it, we should all pack it in.” It is hard to ignore the possibility that Gus’s talent comes from the fact he moved to England at the age of 7, an asylum seeker from Liberia.

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