Chelsea invests heavily in their youth academy, but John Terry is the most recent first-team regular and he emerged 15 years ago.

Chelsea's under-18's will play in the first leg of the FA Youth Cup final on Monday, their sixth final in eight years. Their under-19's won the Uefa Youth League this week as well.

Chelsea last met Manchester City in the FA Youth Cup final in 2008 and looking back at that Chelsea XI is a sobering experience. Only Patrick van Aanholt, now at Sunderland, has gone on to have a career in the top flight. The other names that leap out do so mostly for the wrong reasons. There is Gaël Kakuta, the much-heralded Frenchman who nearly cost Chelsea a Fifa transfer ban but whose career stalled via a series of loan moves that led most recently to Rayo Vallecano.

“If you don’t bring kids through the academy, the best thing is to close the academy,” Jose Mourinho said in December of a state-of-the-art facility that costs Chelsea something in the region of £8 million a year to run. “If the kids are not good enough or the work not good enough and you don’t bring kids up, then close the door and use the money to buy players.”

Mourinho has said that if one or more of Izzy Brown, Dom Solanke and Lewis Baker do not become stars he will have failed. “They will be Chelsea players. And when they become Chelsea players, they will become England players, almost for sure,” he said at the start of the season.

Mourinho recently admitted that Chelsea was “not the best habitat” for young players to break into the side, such was the pressure of chasing titles. 

The club insists every player is signed with a view to making the first team, with Eddie Newton given the task of keeping close tabs on every loanee. But looking at the mind-boggling comings and goings – and the big profits made on the likes of Romelu Lukaku (sold to Everton for £28 million) and Kevin De Bruyne (£18 million to Wolfsburg) – it is impossible not to conclude Chelsea are effectively operating a shadow squad that in an FFP era is acting more as a money-making exercise than a pipeline to the first team.