The Football Association has to be commended in landing Fabio Capello as the new England manager - or, as one tabloid headline is bound soon to dub him: 'The Fab Controller'.

But did they have to agree to everything he wanted, including a ridiculous salary?

No international manager is worth £4 million a year after tax, when you consider how little he has to do. Capello played a very crafty game, getting all the Italians he wanted as backroom staff, hiking up the salary and leaving the key FA figures prostrate at his feet in gratitude that he had succumbed graciously to their entreaties.

Yet he wasn't even in a job. Other than his hugely impressive CV as a club coach, he had no major negotiating tools at his disposal. Offering his thoughts weekly to an Italian television station can't possibly compensate such an intelligent and driven character for the challenge of winning football matches with his own team.

Capello was there for the taking and yet the FA made it look as if his capture was a major coup. You can bet that Capello always fancied the England job and, canny cove that he is, pushed his wish list as far as possible, even down to marginalising all English influence.

He may say that he's committed to having a former England hero in his inner sanctum, but what would a David Platt or a Tony Adams do, apart from putting out the cones and handing out the bibs at training?

The engine-room of Team Capello will speak Italian, despite belated attempts from them to learn our lingo. I hope Stuart Pearce has the good sense to stay with the Under-21s, shaping careers and remaining his own man, rather than a sop to the media's bruised feelings about Englishmen remaining on the periphery.

This column does not join the chorus from jingoistic jeremiahs about an England team needing to be run by English leaders. We've hardly prospered over the last 40 years with that system, have we? Something has to be done to break the chronic cycle of under-achievement, so why not go for someone who is obviously a class act in both his career and his life?

Hopefully, Capello will take an instant scythe to the culture of self-indulgence attached to Team England. The adjectives 'great' and 'world-class' will then be banished from any public utterances from England players when assessing each other.

And John Terry will be sacked as England captain. Not due to rumours about his private life - although they keep recurring - but because of an attitude to referees this season that has become disdainful and anarchic.

It's not as if Terry should be an automatic choice as a player. If you want a consistent, barnstorming defender, then Jamie Carragher is a sounder bet while Jonathan Woodgate has greater talent and pace.

No longer will we have to listen to the England head coach swoon admiringly to the media about 'JT', 'Stevie G', 'Becks' and 'Lamps', as if it were a private club and the public were lucky to be granted the occasional glimpse of these legends in action.

Capello will be good news in many areas for England. Unlike his new employers.

The FA's responsibility for the travails of the England national side is incontrovertible. It is significant that the only manager to tackle seriously the entrenched attitude of that organisation since the manager's job was created in 1945 was sacked in 1974. But only after Sir Alf Ramsey delivered the World Cup, the only trophy England's football team has won since international tournaments started in 1930.

And why did Brian Clough and Martin O'Neill miss out on the England job? Because they would have challenged the established order and rattled the cages of torpor.

When the top clubs broke away from the Football League to establish the Premiership in 1992, the spin from the FA was that the England national side's fortunes would greatly improve. So the FA sanctioned the establishment of the Premier League, which proceeded to make fortunes for those clubs lucky enough to be sheltering under that umbrella.

Since then, the FA has been marginalised by the elite clubs. Their players have become wealthier and foreign. The clubs have paid no heed to the greater good of the national side and simply acted out of self-interest and naked greed. Television has been the willing cash cow.

In that first heady season of the Premier League, the amount of English players appearing stood at 71 per cent. Fifteen years later, it's down to 38 per cent. Of the top four teams in the Premier League today, none are managed by an Englishman and no first-team goalkeeper is English.

The last English manager to win the FA Cup? Joe Royle in 1995. The last to win the league title? Howard Wilkinson in 1992.

I believe that the influx of foreign players has been good for the English game. If you can't learn from the likes of Thierry Henry and Eric Cantona in training, then you don't deserve to be a professional. And the England team didn't exactly bestride the international arena after 1966, long before the foreign invasion. We can't even get into the last 16 of Europe now. We struggled to give Andorra a deserved hiding earlier this year.

The lack of technical expertise among English players is the biggest problem, not the identity of the next manager. That's why one item on Thursday's agenda of the FA Board meeting is more important than rubberstamping Capello's appointment.

For years, the FA has delayed making a definitive decision about the proposed National Football Centre at Burton-on-Trent. It's the same blueprint adopted by France and Italy in the past two decades, with obvious success.

Influential FA mandarins have jibbed about the cost of this centre of excellence, where players and coaches can be based, honing their technical skills and a technical director can oversee and chart the progress of elite performers.

I'm told that the future of Burton will be decided on Thursday. Sir Trevor Brooking, one of the few English players who looked comfortable on the ball in the past 25 years, is the FA's director of football development and is desperate to see the project started.

The cost of around £60 million is deemed prohibitive in the eyes of some FA Board members who didn't blink at giving Capello everything. Yet its approval is far more crucial than appointing the next England manager if we want to eradicate the spectre of top players unable to master a football with both feet and then pass it to a team-mate 30 yards away.

If Brooking doesn't carry the day on this one, he shouldn't tarry to welcome Capello to the bed of nails next month. He should resign as a matter of principle. Having known and respected Trevor for many years in his BBC Radio days, I wouldn't rule that out.