COMMENT: Of course they're frustrated. They have every right to be. But as upset and aggrieved Chelsea's academy staff are, this latest problem goes way beyond not seeing the fruits of their work up close...

Another week, another self-inflicted error from today's Chelsea board. And with it will come dire, long-term consequences. The latest being the frustration of Chelsea's academy staff, with many considering their futures, as the club's big sell-off this summer will be centred around the squad's homespun talent.

Mason Mount. Conor Gallagher. Ruben Loftus-Cheek. Trevoh Chalobah. They're all available and can leave as Todd Boehly and co attempt to navigate the complexities of Financial Fair Play. Indeed, it's even claimed if Real Madrid table a big enough offer, Boehly will sell them Reece James. The England fullback wasn't raised as Florentino Perez, the Real president, and Boehly lunched at the Zalacaín last month before their Champions League encounter. But Florentino's fellow directors have let the Madrid press know of their interest.

So they could all go. All that talent. All those decades of coaching and commitment. Sold off at a crazy profit. Good business, right? Certainly it'll read as much on the balance sheet. But football isn't played on paper. And for Boehly to make available - and thus potentially lose - so much homespun talent will be felt next season and beyond.

For this column, Chelsea's youth system and it's coaching staff are the best in the world. The setup certainly has been since the turn of the century. So many of Chelsea's most successful academy graduates have been coached right through the system, from the ages of six and seven, to the Champions League podium and beyond. It really should be regarded as English football's development diamond.

As we've followed Chelsea this season, we've talked regularly about football's intangibles. The elements of this industry that you really can't quantify. Culture. Tradition. Things that Lawrence Stewart and Paul Winstanley won't find in their databases. And with this sales decision, it's another error by the board just waiting to be played out.

They're finally catching up. The pundits. The exes. With Chelsea now languishing in the bottom half of the table, we're finally getting credible voices raising the issue of connections and relationships within a dressing room. Emmanuel Petit has had his say. As has fellow Frenchman and former Blue Frank Leboeuf. And they should be heeded - particularly by those running transfer policy at Chelsea. As we've stated time and again this season, you cannot throw a team together as Boehly has and expect instant results.

Instead, with confidence at rock bottom, we're seeing the very worse of what such an approach can bring. Petit, who sat behind the away dugout for defeat at Arsenal, was stunned to see Chelsea's substitutes arguing amongst eachother. Leboeuf, meanwhile, claimed the performance of individuals was so poor it left him "ashamed".

Dramatic? Hyperbolic? Perhaps a little, sure. After all, these exes are paid to drive clicks and headlines. But their sentiment rings true. This club is losing itself. It's losing it's meaning. It's nature. Everything it represented pre-Boehly and ClearLake. It's slowly... actually, scrap that... it's rapidly transforming from a football club to an American franchise where mercenaries are celebrated. And it's only going to get worse as those familiar faces, with over fifteen years of running around on Cobham's training pitches, are encouraged to move on.

This isn't about frontliners. You can argue about Chalobah or Loftus-Cheek and whether they're genuine first-choice talent. But they don't have to be. That's what the chequebook should be for. But squad depth, with an academy as strong as Chelsea's, should never be a problem. Even as a bottom ten club, Chelsea will always seek to buy from the top table. But it makes little sense to sign squad players, as Boehly's management team has, to fill out numbers when there's similar talent produced by the academy staff available. And to dismiss the value of having such players steeped in the coaching and the culture of the club, who can pass this onto any newcomer, is simply inviting more problems.

For this column, if the likes of Mount, Gallagher and RLC are all sold this summer, we fear the worst. Indeed, we're now expecting Andre Santos, a Brazilian, and Kendry Paez, an Ecuadorian, to be the next bright young things to find their way into the Blues first team. Not a Mount. Nor even a Dominic Solanke or Samuel Iling-Junior. But a couple of South Americans. This is a transfer policy that rips at the heart of an English football club. And it's something that simply won't work.

During his days at Chelsea, Petit played with John Terry and Frank Lampard. Further back, Leboeuf was part of the era of Dennis Wise and Ken Bates. There was a spirit about the place. A culture, which obviously both Frenchman now cannot recognise in today's version of their old club.

And that's only going to get worse if Chelsea's academy graduates are sold off. Those long time youth coaches have every right to feel aggrieved.