An interesting experiment is to begin in the city of Rustenberg in South Africa's North West Province on Saturday. The English Football Association will attempt to discover whether it is possible to buy the World Cup.
In domestic football, buying success has always been the business of the richest clubs. Manchester United did it, Chelsea do it, Manchester City would like to. European success is bought, too: by Real Madrid, AC Milan, even holier-than-thou Barcelona.
In international football, however, countries live by their wits. If you haven't got a striker, a goalkeeper or a decent left back, tough: no solution can be found in the transfer market. That is why so many successful club coaches find the transition to the international game difficult.
Sven Goran Eriksson could throw money at Lazio's shortcomings, but faced with a big hole on the left of England's midfield, he struggled for a remedy for years.
There are only two areas in which a national association can spend to get ahead. Facilities and coaching. Investment can be made in training camps and youth development schemes as has happened in France at the Clairefontaine Academy, but these plans unfold over years and often take a decade or more to reach fruition.
The quick fix, then, is to lavish funds on the manager and hope he alone can turn around a flawed system. This was the path the FA took the day they signed on with Fabio Capello.
They are as good as unaccompanied on this journey. Other countries have expensive, marquee name managers such as Marcello Lippi of Italy. But Lippi is a native and, although well rewarded, has come through the Italian system to manage his country. Then there are costly imports, including Eriksson with Ivory Coast and Ottmar Hitzfeld, a German currently in charge of Switzerland. These countries lack international pedigree, however, and have a tradition of using foreign coaches to develop the team.
What makes England unique is that this is a major football nation, with a strong, influential league producing top quality players that has thought nothing of rejecting its own coaches to pay £6 million a year for an Italian in a flagrant attempt to cut corners to World Cup victory.
This isn't right. If England were to win in South Africa it could only be a shared triumph because the coaching know-how from the manager through to the backroom staff and even the preferred system of play and disciplinary standards would be imported. An Anglo-Italian triumph, then. Celebrated no less fervently at home, but not the same.
If the best available English coach is Capello's inferior, the FA should be made to raise their standards, not solve the problem with a flourish of the cheque book. International football should be the best of theirs against the best of yours, certainly at the highest level. Otherwise, what is the point? We may as well enter representative League XI's if nationality is insignificant.
Yes, developing countries often need external influence to improve, but no team inside FIFA's top 50 ranking when a tournament begins should be permitted a foreign coach. It isn't fair that a national association behaves like Real Madrid and for purists there is only one consolation. No foreign coach has ever won a World Cup.