Mason Mount has fallen off a football cliff... and his decline highlights the shameful strategy at two of our biggest clubs

KAI HAVERTZ is the champions League final goalscorer who fell from the edge of a football cliff only to climb back up again.

sadly the young englishman who played the wonderful, inchperfect pass through to Havertz as chelsea defeated Manchester city in Porto three years ago is still lying amid the rocks on the beach.

Mason Mount, only 25, is an example of how quickly things can turn against you in football. Bad decisions, bad luck and bad form can all draw the clouds across the face of the sun pretty quickly.

But Mount’s retreat into the shadows of the english game talks to more than just individual misfortune. No, the root cause of it runs deeper and is indicative of just how shamefully poor the strategy and decision-making continues to be at some of our biggest clubs.

Mount is the young academy product sold by one club who really could not afford to lose him and bought by another, Manchester united, who didn’t really need him. He is a victim of the short-termism that still plagues the Premier League, of a culture that continues to view the future as somebody else’s problem.

Mount was a chelsea boy from the age of six. told by his father that he wouldn’t be given his chance at the club, he looked at John terry, the club captain, and decided he would follow his path. at times he had to move sideways to go forwards. at Vitesse arnhem, the club captain took one look at the teenage loanee and wondered why someone had sent a mascot into the first- team dressing room. Mount was voted Player of the Year that season.

He played for Derby in the championship, too, and then returned to his home where he flourished. He won the champions League, played in three Fa cup finals and earned 36 england caps. He was talked of as a future chelsea captain.

and then, last summer, chelsea sold him. When he returned to the Bridge with united in april, the home supporters booed him and called him a traitor.

But Mount never really wanted to leave chelsea. the reasons that he did so are complicated and contradictory when you listen to both sides of it. But the bottom line is Mount felt he had not been made to feel fully valued, either by the Roman abramovich regime or the bumbling, chaotic todd Boehly era that has followed.

Mount was one of chelsea’s own, a good lad with talent who’d never looked beyond wearing a blueand-white shirt. If he had played at a club like Manchester city or Liverpool, he would have been drowning in the best contract the club could afford, tied down to a future so long that he could barely see all the way to the end of it.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, chelsea prevaricated on laying down the really big numbers. Mount, still on the £80,000-a-week deal he signed as a 20-year-old on his return from Derby, looked around the dressing room and saw other, newer players arriving on far better salaries.

He sensed the drift that had been allowed to set in after a champions League triumph that should have been a springboard. so, despite a personal intervention by Boehly and the fact a contract was on the table, he left for Old trafford last summer, a move that felt wrong from the start.

IN Manchester, manager erik ten Hag needed top players to improve upon a decent first season that had taken united back into the champions League. But his budget for the summer was a relatively modest £150million. With that in mind, it seems extraordinary now that the club spent a third of it on Mount.

united needed a footballer who could transform their midfield. the Brazilian casemiro had done it for a season but his legs were going. they needed a player to drag them forwards, both literally and metaphorically. they needed authority, a leader. they needed someone like Declan Rice, for example. Mount was never likely to be that player — it’s just not him — and it would be interesting to know who at Old trafford ever thought he would be.

Injuries have ruined Mount’s first season at united. He has hardly played. If united recruit well this summer, he may begin to adorn that midfield like he once did chelsea’s. He is a smart passer and an intelligent runner. But he was never going to do it all on his own. He does not have that presence or that authority, either as a player or an individual.

It has been interesting this week listening to people tell me city have made the Premier League boring. city have not done that. city have set elite standards in terms of playing, coaching and recruiting. What has been boring has been watching chelsea, united and others spending an awful lot of money so very badly in an attempt to drag themselves on to the shoulder of the winners of the last four titles.

city continue to exist under the cloud of financial doping allegations and one day we will know the truth of all that. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned from the strategic structuring and planning of their whole football operation.

the english champions put 15 years of time, money and expertise into Phil Foden and he now has a sky-blue world at his feet. chelsea did likewise with Mason Mount and then watched him walk away.