From the Netherlands has sprung Johan Cruyff, Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp and Total Football. Since 2002 it has also been the home of an integrated professional and amateur network of 2,700 clubs that this week Uefa stated should be the model that English football adopts if it is ever to replicate the kind of success enjoyed by Dutch players and teams.

Whereas Cruyff and his compatriots have helped Holland to three World Cup finals and victory at Euro 88, England have contested only one World Cup and two European Championship semi-finals since Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet trophy 45 years ago. This week William Gaillard, the adviser to Uefa's president, Michel Platini, identified English football's factional nature and lack of significant funding as the fault lines that blight the sport here.

Gaillard told a parliamentary select committee that the Football Association should look to the Netherlands if England is ever going to address the malaise in player development. He said: "There is no doubt that turf wars have damaged English football, and the FA is probably in a weaker spot than any other in Europe. Holland is an excellent grassroots model."

A tour around amateur clubs in the Amsterdam area showed the stark difference in facilities between the Netherlands and England. Clubs such as ASV Arsenal, Sporting Martinus, SC Buitenveldert, Swift, AFC, SV Bijlmer and Legmeervogels boast facilities that always include floodlit grass and artificial turf pitches, dedicated medical centres, warm changing rooms, hot showers, spacious clubhouses and adequate car parking and bicycle ports – all of which placed the clubs at the centre of their local communities.

Their structure is also more professional than amateur. Dennis van Soest, who runs the commercial affairs of Legmeervogels, says: "Legmeer has 1,250 members. The owners are the members. Control and management is executed by the board of directors, which consists of 10 persons, of which five are part of the daily board. We have a chairman who is responsible for the youth department.

"Daily maintenance is done by our facilities' managers. We have around 200 active volunteers and 120 companies that sponsor our association. Membership costs on average €180 [£160] per year."

Broadly, the Dutch model that allows all this has been in place for nine years. Louis van Gaal, then the national coach, integrated the sport across six regions on behalf of the Dutch FA, the KNVB. This pyramid consists of the 2,700 clubs – of which 36 are professional – that are governed by a single body, the KNVB, with the amateur game benefiting from €1bn a year of investment.

The KNVB has around 1.2 million members (7% of the Dutch population), with local authorities contributing 90% of the €1bn investment and the government the remainder. English football's ongoing dispute between the FA, the Premier League and the Football League has resulted in inferior funding for the amateur game, in comparison to the Netherlands.

In 2000 the Football Foundation stated that the FA would contribute £20m per annum to grassroots football in England. Yet by last year the FA's contribution was only £12m. The Premier League contributes £43.4m, less than 5% of its latest £3.1bn TV rights deal.

In the Netherlands the key ethos is that all age-group teams should play 4-3-3 and that coaching sessions should be fun, with individuality allowed whether players are future stars of Ajax, PSV Eindhoven and FC Twente or destined to remain in the grassroots game. Competitive youth football is also played between professional and amateur clubs, which means standards between the sport's two strands are closer.

In England winning, not enjoyment, has traditionally been the end game. And it would be unheard of for a youth side from Manchester United, Chelsea or Liverpool to play against, say, an equivalent team from the Civil Service or Enfield Old Grammarians.

Bryan Roy, the former Nottingham Forest and Holland forward, is a coach at the Jong Ajax academy, which is a renowned conveyer belt of fresh talent. He confirms the closer dynamic between the amateur and professional game. "Until the age of 14 our teams from professional clubs still play against teams from amateur clubs," he says. "Holland's overall football philosophy is to always focus on ball possession to create opportunities. This is also true at amateur clubs. In the youth they always think in an attacking way."

In 2008 one enlightened English father, Steve Lawrence, decided to harness the Dutch vision by moving his family to Amsterdam so that his then 16-year-old son, Jamie, could improve his development there, after he had formerly been with Arsenal and Queens Park Rangers. Jamie began at HFC Haarlem, then a professional club, and is now at Ajax. His father was the architect of the original feasibility study and master plan for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

He submitted written evidence to the same parliamentary select committee that Gaillard addressed. "I've visited about 60 or 70 amateur football clubs [in the Netherlands]. On average they have around €3-4m of facilities [in] land and buildings. That's about €10bn in total. Effectively, they're all better than the standard academies in England so Holland has 2,700 academies. It's no surprise that Holland is No2 in the Fifa world rankings."

While the two nations have an almost identical population density, they are on very different points on the development scale. Roy states that Holland is intent on becoming more successful on the field. "We tend to focus more on tactics instead of technical improvements – that's the next step," he says.

English football's dream is to have only this concern.