The record low number of homegrown players fielded in the Premier League this season demonstrates that England’s group stage failure in the summer’s World Cup has not immediately prompted clubs to give more of their young players a chance. The league itself has responded to the finding, by CIES Football Observatory, that only 13.9% of players this season have been homegrown, by restating its clubs’ commitment to a youth policy and a promise that the elite player performance plan will bear fruit.

The opposite view is taken by Raffaele Poli, head of the CIES, whose crunched figures put the Premier League behind France, Spain and Germany in the “big five” leagues for fielding homegrown players. He said it is plain that a fiercely competitive league, so very much richer than any other, has a natural tendency to buy ready-made stars. Without some intervention, an agreed commitment to fielding boys who have given their youth to a club, is it really likely the “EPPP” will so improve them they will gain selection above a mature international star?

Greg Dyke, when appointed to chair the Football Association, identified the decline in English players appearing for top clubs as his key issue but, for a man billed as a fighter ready to speak the truth to the Premier League powerful, his “commission” turned out to be a thing of limpness. Launching it last September, Dyke made it clear he had talked to people across football and many of them, hungry for reform and a braver FA, had told him this issue was a symptom of structural faultlines: an over-powerful, financially obsessed Premier League, which had left the game’s culture hollowed out.

Dyke acknowledged his own role, as an ITV executive, in supporting the top First Division clubs’ breakaway from the Football League, to form the Premier League and keep all the money from an exponentially increased 1992 television deal. He claimed that the divided game since, and weakening of the England team’s status, were an “unintended consequence” of that breakaway which he backed (although ultimately ITV did not claim the TV rights and Dyke was gazumped by Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB).

Finding himself, by a trick of history, the FA chairman, Dyke said it was his solemn duty to examine these “unintended consequences”. They explicitly included the question he said had been posed by people in his chats around the game about the overseas super-rich who have bought the top-flight clubs: “If your top league is largely foreign owned with foreign managers, why should those in control care about developing the England team?”

Dyke promised to address that, along with issues such as clubs signing overseas players for their own youth teams, the expense of signing adult English players and Gary Neville’s publicly-voiced belief that he would never have reached Manchester United’s first team had he been coming through now, after 20 years of the Premier League, rather than in 1992. “They are just some of the theories that have been brought to my attention,” Dyke said, “theories which the commission will look at.”

Except that it never did. When the first report arrived before the World Cup, with its widely derided idea for a Premier B League interfering somewhere down football’s cherished pyramid, one rifled through it in vain for the answers to that bold, difficult question about ownership. When the second instalment was issued earlier this month, with memories of England’s early World Cup exit already being drowned out by Premier League action, Dyke produced a promise for investment in grass-roots facilities. That is long overdue – 22 years of mostly neglect since the clubs ignored the FA’s wider ambitions for the Premier League breakaway – and welcome, if he can pull together the £230m he said is needed.

But in that report, too, there was no mention of the brave questions he set out, about whether an imperative of the Premier League, and its sale to overseas investors, may have led to insufficient interest in the England team and by inference, the game’s national fabric.

Within the FA some say Dyke deserves credit because at least he raised the issue. But it is baffling that he did so, then did not have the fight to seek answers to his own questions. Now the Premier League has the FA chairman where it wants him: the B league idea is scrapped – for now, the FA acknowledges – and the FA is hunting around for money to build a new generation of AstroTurf pitches finally to upgrade the municipal mudbaths.

English youngsters, their parents and the wider game are left with future promises, of the EPPP, while the numbers given chances in the here and now continue to decline.