How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sheikh Mansour

The reports of the death of football are greatly exaggerated.

Everywhere you turn these days, some columnist, talking head or message board Chicken Little is predicting Manchester City's transfer market spending orgy will bring about the end of the world's favorite sport.

The thinking goes that some middling English club whose number came up in the Abu Dhabi lottery will buy glory at the expense of all those honest, more deserving clubs out there, while sending player values into the stratosphere.

In reality, however, the only thing in any real peril is the status quo.

To hear the naysayers prattle on, you'd think we're currently enjoying a game free of the corrupting influence of money. Football is not the babe in the woods this lot would have us believe. If you need proof, look at who has been winning the trophies.

England is dominated by its Big Four: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool. The Premier League has turned into an annual exercise of figuring out the order in which those four will finish atop the league. Speculation over whether upstarts Aston Villa might pip Arsenal for fourth place passes for drama these days.

In Europe, clubs like Steaua Bucureşti and Nottingham Forest had been crowned champions as recently as the 1980s, but clearly cash rules everything around UEFA these days, as the past winners have been Manchester United, AC Milan, Barcelona, Liverpool.

Money has long since stratified football, with clubs engorged on Champions League revenues swooping in and raiding smaller clubs for talent. To yearn for the days when money didn't buy success is to go back much farther than most of the people making these arguments care to realize.

Apologists for big football clubs will argue that they have earned their status as big spenders by virtue of their success on the pitch, but have they really? Success has come at a price even for vaunted clubs like Manchester United and AC Milan.

United's debt has reached frightening levels, and were the club to miss out on Champions League football even one season it almost certainly would be unable to afford its sizable debt payments. Likewise, AC Milan are in the red to the point they were much more proactive in finding a prospective buyer for Kaká than has been suggested by the media.

Unless they are selling stars to Manchester City, these clubs do stand to lose the most. With the deepest pockets in world football thanks to owner Sheikh Mansour, who views the entire enterprise as good advertising around the world for Abu Dhabi, City are free to spend without worry of plunging farther into debt.

There will be some slight inflationary effect on transfer fees and salaries as a result, as agents and selling clubs will play up possible interest from City to get the most in transfer fees and wages. However, this really should only affect City's direct competition, meaning the Big Four in England, the three Italian powers Inter Milan, AC Milan, and Juventus, and Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona.

It's not as if City will be getting into bidding wars with Port Vale over Gareth Owen. Only the very top of the transfer market will be affected, and as any consumer credit advisor can tell you, clubs in debt like Manchester United and Milan really shouldn't be spending that money anyway.

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