England no longer expects. Instead England shrugs, mutters about the intrusion of the international break into the new season and obsessively checks its club website for new signings.

That many can barely even be bothered to raise a shrug of indifference to Wednesday’s friendly against Norway is no surprise. None of the underlying issues – the pre-eminence of club football, the accelerating constriction of the supply line of homegrown talent, a sense of drift about England’s chances – is new. It is just that they seem to be coalescing into a perfect storm that could, for all the best efforts of the Football Association, add up to a major longer-term headache in footballing and financial terms.

If anything, the remarkable thing remains that an expected crowd of up to 40,000 is willing to trek up Olympic Way to watch Roy Hodgson’s men try to put their dismal summer behind them against unattractive opposition.

Yet the crowd is likely to be the lowest ever attendance for an England game at the new Wembley, lower than the 48,876 who watched Fabio Capello’s England beat Sweden 1-0 with Bobby Zamora leading the line in November 2011. Other nations still look agog at the number of fans prepared to troop through the Wembley turnstiles – pre-World Cup friendlies against Denmark and Peru attracted 68,573 and 83,578 respectively. But the fear for the FA’s overworked marketeers must be that the “realistic expectations” (even then unmet) that accompanied Hodgson’s side to Brazil will bottom out into apathy. The new captain, Wayne Rooney, has promised a “new chapter” but many may soon stop reading altogether.

From one look at the squad the doom-laden scenario set out in Greg Dyke’s FA commission report is made flesh – fewer “star names”, fewer players from the top clubs and fewer who are automatic starters. While England’s 10 outfield players trained on Monday, the rest of the football world was gripped by the temporary insanity of a transfer deadline day that further highlighted the dwindling supply line of young English talent.

There is some merit to the FA’s argument that the September “back to school” international break, interrupting the rhythm of the new domestic calendar, has always been a difficult sell. But persuading the paying public to come and watch England is becoming ever harder. For younger generations reared on individual global superstars, Super Sundays and the Champions League, it is hard to see how the pull of watching England can compete.

There is a paradox at work. The World Cup in Brazil was in many ways a reaffirmation of all that international football can be. But for England the opposite may be true.

All that could change if by some strange alchemy a dynamic young side emerges from the convoluted Euro 2016 qualifying process. But the FA is left facing in two directions. It is at once decrying the lack of young English talent as part of chairman Dyke’s rallying cry for systemic change while insisting that new blood can rejuvenate interest in the national team.

It is not as if they are not trying – for the first time there is a more general England fan club that goes beyond the hardcore who travel away and there is a renewed focus on breaking down barriers between players and fans using social media. The emphasis is as much on a good value family day out (the FA points out that half of Wednesday’s tickets are £30 or less) as the quality of the football on offer. The general secretary, Alex Horne, has promised high-profile friendlies against Italy, France, Germany and Spain in the next two years.

Then Uefa’s Nations League will kick in to try to maintain interest in an international calendar partly robbed of intrigue by its own shortsighted decision to expand the European Championship finals to 24 teams.

Beyond the philosophical musing about the relative importance of international football to players and fans, there are cold financial considerations. Some insulation is afforded by the fact that most of the FA’s deals (with the notable exception of an FA Cup sponsor and a title backer for the grassroots scheme formerly known as Tesco Skills) are in place until 2018.

But ever since the new £757m national stadium belatedly reopened seven years ago the loans taken out to build it have hung like a millstone around the FA. That burden is slowly reducing, with the outstanding total now at around £200m. Now the more pressing problem surrounds the 17,000 Club Wembley 10-year debentures that are due for renewal in 2017.

The entire financial model is predicated on luring back the canapé-munching classes as well as reigniting the interest of the wider public beyond that date. If watching England further loses its lustre in that time, that job will become immeasurably more difficult – whatever the “Wembley experience”.