Sam Wallace: Ruben Loftus-Cheek - a £1.7m contract for the 17-year-old Chelsea player? Why not?

The promise of Ruben Loftus-Cheek, the 17-year-old Chelsea academy and England junior international, has been well known in football for some time.

The Sunday Mirror story about the wholly unedifying squabble between agents to represent him, which will go to an FA tribunal, revealed just how highly the club rate him.

There will be the usual horror at the fact that he has been offered a contract worth £1.7m before he has even played a first-team game. There will be plenty of old professionals wheeled out to say it was not like this in their day. But the clubs have created this market and if they are prepared to pay a boy from Swanage that money, good luck to him.