JUST how rich is the English Premier League?

Wealthy enough to leave £300 million ($900m) worth of football talent twiddling their thumbs on the bench.

The staggering wealth of the EPL was brought into focus over the past weekend.

And it was not the multi-million dollar footballers on the pitch that stole the show.

It was their colleagues who can't get a game, reported the Daily Mail.

Case in point: The combined cost of Chelsea's substitutes for the visit of West Ham was a mammoth £67.6m - about five times the annual transfer budget of smaller clubs like Derby and Reading.

Even the most expensive goalkeeper in Britain found himself warming the bench.

Sunderland's £9m Scotland international, Craig Gordon, was named among the substitutes for the game against Derby.

All told, players who cost their clubs a total of £300.5m in transfer fees - including 58 full internationals - were on the bench in the weekend's 10 EPL games.

And those figures do not take into account free transfers or the value of players developed by a club's youth system.

Reading were the only club without an international among their substitutes, while Bolton were the only club whose replacements did not cost a transfer fee.

How times have changed.

Go back to the first season of the Premier League, in 1992, when only three substitutes were permitted to be named.

JOURNEYMAN

At the time, the bench at most clubs was populated by a combination of young, emerging players, journeymen pros and cheap squad players - with the occasional big-money signing returning to full fitness.

These days, it is not uncommon for a former European Footballer of the Year (Chelsea's Andriy Shevchenko), World Cup winners (Chelsea's Juliano Belletti and Arsenal's Gilberto Silva) or Britain's most expensive teenager (Arsenal's Theo Walcott) to be on the sidelines.

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