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It’s a match between 16-year-olds from Turkey and France, the picture quality is terrible, the atmosphere in the empty ground is worse and the commentary is in French. But on YouTube, the highlights have been watched by more than a quarter of a million people, and I will wager that the vast majority are English.

The reason? The internet clip features Gaël Kakuta, the Chelsea purchase who brought the club a lengthy transfer ban. The viewers will be Chelsea fans trying to work out whether he was worth it. And being rewarded, it must be said, by video of a stunning display.

But before anyone can work out if he is a net gain or loss, it is necessary to establish what the cost of Chelsea’s transfer ban is likely to be to the club. What will the impact be on the club’s performance? The Fink Tank’s Dr Ian Graham and Dr Henry Stott have been attempting to find out.

The intuition that the ban might be quite damaging comes from the existence of the well-known relationship between cash and points. The wage bill, for instance, is so strongly linked to the number of points clubs obtain that its influence drowns out nearly everything else.

Establishing the relationship between the transfer value of a squad and its performance begins with a tricky problem — how do you decide what the market value is? Steven Gerrard, for instance, has not been bought or sold, so how do you assess what he would fetch? The Fink Tank has been using the respected transfermarkt.co.uk, where player value is kept under constant review by the user community. This is not flawless data, but eyeballing them, they seem reasonable estimates.

And, lo and behold, there is, as you would hope and expect, a strong relationship between the aggregate squad value for each club and the number of points they score.

What we are interested in, however, is the net change in any given club from one season to the next and how much difference it makes. To calculate this, one has to account for Premier League inflation. In 2005-06, the average club had a squad value of £78 million, in 2006-07 it was £88 million and in 2008-09 it was £102 million. Indeed, if Chelsea suffer it will be because their squad value remains fairly static (perhaps declining slightly owing to age), while others rise.

So the Fink Tank team looked at Premier League inflation-adjusted squad values for each club over the past three seasons and plotted these against points obtained. And suddenly things look rather different.

When the Fink Tank looked at the way the transfer value of the Chelsea squad changes from one season to the next and compared that with the change in points, it was not possible to discern a pattern. And this is true for club after club.

The graphic shows this, er, graphically. Over the close season in 2008 some teams were net spenders, some net savers. But the change in their points total in the coming season was unpredictable.

How can this be? Well, for a single club such as Chelsea or, say, Everton, a single signing can make a big difference. You buy Andriy Shevchenko for a vast sum, for example, or Tim Cahill for a snip. And this guides the data. At the individual club level, access to the transfer market makes a difference only if you use it well.

So it is simply not possible to say with confidence that the transfer ban will harm Chelsea and it is really quite possible that if Kakuta turns out to be brilliant, he will have been worth all the trouble.