Farewell to the best transfer ban in memory. Greatest of all time? It remains to be seen, but in less than a year, the conditions have fallen into place to change Chelsea from a club that produced players for other clubs to a club of first team academy graduates, with a young English manager committed to young English footballers.

Without the Fifa ban, Chelsea might still have appointed Frank Lampard this summer – he was an outstanding candidate either way. They might still have promoted Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori and Reece James to the first team squad. Callum Hudson-Odoi might have signed a new contract regardless. The difference being that facing two windows without any possibility of making a new signing, Chelsea – for the first time since they began revolutionising the development game around 2005 – were forced to put their faith in those players.

It was not serendipity that such a talented cohort of players were at the club. Chelsea’s academy had been refining the process of identifying and developing players for years. Indeed, many of those who were cited in the Fifa case against the club, those so-called triallists who stayed for three years, the boys from overseas given new schools and new homes, have all made a small contribution. Through their failures as well as their successes, Chelsea honed the art of making footballers, and just when the authorities discovered what they were up to, so the club had finally made the breakthrough.