Alex Miller: Football is designed to prop up the elite – and Sheffield Wednesday are better off out of it

“Big beats small,” he almost says, in place of ‘beats’ choosing together an altogether swearier old French word meaning fornication.

In life, in football, as in the Peaky Blinders television series he resides in, Solomans is right. In the greedy, hyper-capitalist modern world, increasingly so.

Big does ‘do that’ to small, and as the character says, “always, actually”.

This week third tier Sheffield Wednesday lost two of their most highly-rated young academy prospects when Brentford, a newly-anointed member of football’s Premier League elite, swooped in to pick them up and stick them with the others. Wednesday will be rewarded with a few compensatory shekels.

With the pair only recently old enough to be offered professional contracts, it comes as no fault to Wednesday themselves; less so the players, who have been served an exceptional opportunity to jump forward a few stages in their career ambitions. Brentford? No fault there, merely the wherewithal to take advantage of the system.

But what on earth is the point of Wednesday having ploughed money, time and resources into the development of these players but for the club to be pillaged when the time is right? It’s happened in the past of course and it may well happen again.

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The solution? With football set up the way it is, there isn’t one – and if there was, it wouldn’t be implemented as it goes against the benefit of the more powerful.

True, Wednesday are to a degree predators as well as prey. Rotherham United fans may have felt similar about Wednesday being able to pluck two of their promotion winners from the changing room, with salary a driving force in their decision.

There was more to it of course – plenty of footballers would be attracted by the footballing merits of swapping Rotherham for Hillsborough – the feeling from t’other side of Meadowhall may be that tuna trumped the romance of football this time.

As the cash reserves at the top of the game swell and the elite level cartwheels towards a cacophony of state-owned super clubs and Super Leagues, the ladder is being kicked from below.

To climb into that club? Of VAR and NFTs and of five hurried minutes at the end of Match of the Day watching your team get hammered by an oil club? You can keep it.

MORE: Sheffield Wednesday identify two possible striker transfers – meeting to be held to discuss next steps

The shoe-horned Peaky Blinders reference is a deeply convoluted effort that falls down a touch when you look at the context. In the years after the Great War – the time period in which Peaky Blinders is set – there was a feeling of meritocracy to the economy and those who dared to dream as the country rebuilt itself.

A century on the system is set up to safeguard the wealthy, with economic policy generally designed by the elite, with the elite in mind. Sure, the odd crack appears for people to make a quick dash for, but generally speaking the system serves those at the top.

As football becomes more and more of an economic behemoth, why should we expect it to behave any differently?

Big f***s small, after all. Always, actually. More’s the pity.