When Chelsea beat Leicester at home earlier this season, symbolically shifting the balance of power between last season's champions and this year's likely winners, Antonio Conte substituted on three homegrown prospects.
That is not supposed to happen at Stamford Bridge. The academy's finest players have traditionally found themselves nowhere near the first-team. For a long time, the King's Road has been a temporary resting place for promising careers.
There seems to have been a structure, based around their use of the loan market, designed to produce players for sale rather than for first-team action.
