There was much snarky amusement a few years back when plans were unveiled to transform Croydon, south London’s grey, unloved sub-suburban satellite town, into “the new Barcelona”. Under a new municipal scheme a region described by David Bowie as “everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from” would be transported from a deep-concrete nightmare of tower blocks and strangulating traffic into an uplifting place crammed with boulevards, glass towers, “sky gardens” and actual nice bits.

In fairness Barcelona is still probably just about shading it for now. But something is happening in Croydon. For a start it’s producing professional footballers, and lots of them. Twenty years ago Harry Pearson wrote a brilliant book called The Far Corner, a love letter to football in the north-east, which was still very much the “hot-bed” of the domestic game. England had just reached the World Cup semi-finals with four north-east players in the team. Bob Paisley and Brian Clough had won more European Cups than Germany. The idea of a frothingly ambitious manager willingly moving from Newcastle to Crystal Palace really wouldn’t have made much sense at all.

How times change. Anyone attempting a similar anatomy of English football’s most productive centre a few years from now may find themselves looking south. In fact it might be worth starting with a 10 mile square of suburban south-east London bordered by the Barcelona of the A23 at its south-western edge, with Orpington, Woolwich and Lambeth the other three corners. Because right now this seems to be where it’s at.

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On Saturday Crystal Palace, a club at the estuary between the rich waters of Croydon and south-east London, will play Southampton in the FA Cup. It is a meeting of arguably the two most locally centred squads in the Premier League, a fixture that could see as many as four players on each team either born, raised or schooled within a few miles of their current club.

If the success of Southampton’s academy has been well rehearsed the emergence of south London as the breadbasket of the Premier League is less celebrated. This is hardly one of the traditional football heartlands. In the past century south of the Thames has burped up the odd England player of note, from Vivian Woodward of Kennington to Rio Ferdinand of Peckham. But the industrial north, Merseyside, Essex and the East End have been the real production powerhouses. Until now. Currently 14% of English footballers in the Premier League are from that 10 mile golden square of south London. The borough of Croydon alone – home to 0.6% of the population – has produced 5% of all active English Premier League players, among them Wilfried Zaha, Victor Moses and Lewis Grabban from Palace and more disparately Jamal Blackman of Chelsea and Jason Puncheon and Kieran Gibbs via the original Wimbledon.

It is a rich seam that stretches up from the West Croydon basin, through the Surrey canal to the docks at Rotherhithe and then east along the river. With benefits for all too. Liverpool’s transfer committee may have been a clearing house for the lost and confused in recent years. But in Nathaniel Clyne, Joe Gomez and Jordon Ibe (Brixton, Greenwich, Bermondsey) they have hauled in probably the best of young London.

With more to come too. Even now should the London-Croydon nexus declare national independence a current XI of Blackman, Clyne, Gomez, Chris Smalling, Ryan Bertrand, Puncheon, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Ben Watson, Ibe, Moses and Zaha could probably make it to the next Euros. All hail the concrete Catalonia!

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Liverpool duo Jordon Ibe and Nathaniel Clyne are among a host of young English players to come out of south London. Photograph: Carl Recine/Reuters

There are some simple explanations for this. Suburban south London is a large, prosperous catchment area these days. A school with a little sport left in it, a supportive parent with a car and money for subs: this is the most common route now into an academy-led system that increasingly throws up players from distant suburban areas.

Plus, when it comes to south-east London it is inevitable that race will come in too, if only because pretty much every one of the golden square’s young Premier League players is black or mixed race, part of London’s familiar story of immigrants, children of immigrants, children of children of immigrants. Whether you celebrate the idea of a cultural melting pot or choose to live in an imaginary 1920s of your own devising, this is surely a sign of something going right somewhere.

I played as a kid in the south London leagues and it must be said it was a pretty racist and disorderly place at times. Read Ian Wright’s first autobiography and there are enough incidental details about how hard it was getting on back then in south London, how brutal football’s environment could be. Things have changed. Football may have its problems, but it does have more progressive, inclusive, productive structures. Just look at some of the kids it’s churning out now. Ibe, Gomez and Clyne: these are some pretty mature, admirable, well-formed young men. Treat them right and Liverpool have a sound south London core there for the next decade or so. You’re welcome!

Plus of course power and wealth in English football is increasingly clustered in the south. London’s riches and huge population, the clumping together in one short urban radius of talent, scouts, travel links, overseas investors, hope, opportunity: this all feeds and nourishes itself. Manchester and Liverpool have prospered for the same reasons as London: overseas money and a resonant name. But the great, clanking corrugated theatres of English football over the last century – Elland Road, Hillsborough, the City Ground – are now strictly localised points of interest.

Meanwhile London continues to whirl and churn, a great chomping set of jaws flecking everybody around it with a rich spittle of crumbs and leftovers. West Ham are currently freewheeling into a brand new stadium built with £600m of public money. Tottenham, like Arsenal, can borrow and build, in part because London will always provide. QPR, Charlton and Fulham seem to have found the wrong kind of egotistical billionaire but never mind. When you’re a Londoner salvation is only ever an ambitious sovereign wealth fund away. For Palace, burning through the current TV money but more or less assured of a more profitable future, an imminent US-led redevelopment may bring something else, perhaps a more remote, more corporate club. But not before south London’s golden square, the Barcelona of the Brighton Road, has had its day.