The Europa League, which sounded like a new far-right party when Uefa invented it, has revealed a truth about top-level football, in which every little setback starts a clamour to hand over £40m for some hot-shot so his school of agent-sharks can feed.

Days ago a caller to a phone-in berated Manchester United for buying "a dud" in Mame Biram Diouf. It had escaped the hot brain of this irate Dave from Dewsbury that Diouf is 22 and joined United in January from Norwegian football. Five appearances and one goal later, the young Senegalese striker, who was recommended by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was being dismissed as a flop despite all the precedents of youngsters from foreign countries needing time to download big-club software.

Fulham's training ground at Motspur Park is in the kind of nondescript south London suburb the Kinks or the Jam might have written a tune about. But it feels just like Carrington. It is big, well‑equipped and radiates purpose. It is a place where a manager and his coaches extract the maximum productivity from the talent they already have instead of dreaming about the star names they would love to buy.

For a decade or more English football has been unable to see beyond getting and spending. The elimination of all four Premier League clubs from the Champions League by the quarter-final stage has put fresh heat on chief executives to burn cash they don't have. Then, 21 seconds into a Europa League quarter-final against Wolfsburg, Bobby Zamora, below, once the bête noire of Fulham fans, fires Roy Hodgson's team into the semi-finals in the 16th match of a campaign that started on 30 July in Lithuania, and that has also taken them past Shakhtar Donetsk (the holders) and Juventus.

The mid-table Premier League game at Anfield today is also a rehearsal for a potential European final in Hamburg on 12 May. For Liverpool, who face Atlético Madrid in the last four of the Consolation Cup, Uefa's Byzantine Europa construct feels like a punishment: a walk of shame that speaks of regression. A club with five European Cups to shine could feel no other way about a competition that looked like a dumping ground in the way the Uefa and European Cup-Winners' Cups never quite did.

A second-tier continental championship is not to be sneered at, though, especially now, particularly down by the Thames, where Fulham were an exercise in self-deprecation until Mohammed Fayed took his punt and Hodgson's appointment on 28 December 2007 turned out to be one of the most inspired headhunts in the whole sack-happy saga of the Premier League.

Eleven months after he led them to their highest ever league finish (seventh place), Hodgson has coached Zamora to the edge of a World Cup spot with England and sculpted European semi-finalists from a squad of vastly improved nearly-men. Danny Murphy was nearly a top-six midfielder, Paul Konchesky was nearly a top-half left-back, Damien Duff was nearly the wizard he used to be at Blackburn and Chelsea, Zamora was nearly, but not quite, good enough to be the main goal-getter in a top-10 Premier League side.

"No tree grows to heaven" Hodgson told me in November, in an interview in these pages, citing an old Swedish adage. What he meant was that expectation can explode on you. He said: "I constantly preach the message that all the time we can remain a Premier League club, filling the stadium with 25,000 people, playing the sort of football that those 25,000 people seem to appreciate, I've got to say I think that's success."

This is the obverse of the Champions League mentality, so maybe this is what the Europa League is really for: reason, rather than mania. Hodgson even went so far as to question the wisdom of heavy spending: "Who knows: maybe one or two of those big-hitters we'd brought in for £10-15m, and £50,000 or £60,000 a week – money we don't pay – wouldn't be as dedicated to doing the job on the training field. Maybe it would be a different type of management. Maybe we'd be handing the club over to them."

In football as we know it this is counter-intuitive, and brilliant, because Hodgson is defending the old faith. A good manager identifies stalled talent and coaches it to a far higher level. At Viking FK in Norway, he sees that Brede Hangeland is good enough to play in the Premier League and later brings him over. He and his staff spot Chris Smalling playing centre-back for Maidstone United and within nine months of his first-team debut are selling him on to Manchester United for £10m.

In a vanished showbiz past, when Craven Cottage was a house of post-war fun, Tommy Trinder would promise his cashmere camel coat to anyone who could score a hat-trick, and Charlie Mitten would order Johnny Haynes off the physio's table so his dog could be treated for a race at Wimbledon.

It took Fulham an age to transcend that knockabout mythology. They made football laugh. Now they ask it to learn.