Money, Millionaires and the Beautiful Game: A Fan's Perspective

Manchester City's last minute signing of Chelsea FC's number-one target Robinho, is, to me, one of the finest examples one can point to when talking about the direction modern football is going in.

When I first heard the news of this historically mediocre and uninspiring side becoming the richest football club in history in a heartbeat, the only thing that took the edge off of the shock was that they had ruined Chelsea's day, who have a special place in my heart as the beacon of all that is wrong with the modern game.

They are my favourite example of just how laughably easy it is to buy the game of football in the 21st Century.

As a Liverpool fan, one of the things that has bothered me the most about the meteoric rise of Chelsea FC from EPL, is the complete lack of any pedigree or history in the club.

You won't find many other groups of supporters with as much venom for Manchester United as Liverpool fans, but even we have to grudgingly admit that Alex Ferguson (I won't give him his meaningless title of 'sir') has forged a great team that plays winning, entertaining football, and whats more, the club has a long and storied history that they can point to and be proud of when they affair their love of United.

They have risen to the top of the world of football through the virtues of many decades of hard-fought, honest competition, and we, as Liverpool fans, can relate. We hate each other, but we have to respect one another.

But not Chelsea. Chelsea is not a historical force. Chelsea has no pedigree. Chelsea does not play free-flowing football. Chelsea is not a club interested in proving themselves to their fans, in living by a credo and working to forge a culture that the club and the fans can be proud of. Chelsea is one man's plaything, the equivalent of Fantasy Football for an insane billionaire oil tycoon.

The ludicrous nature of modern football is spelled out in the way in which Chelsea FC bought the Premier League Title two years in a row, and hammered away like a blunt object at the Champions League until they got to the final.

Chelsea embodies all that is wrong with the modern game, from their accurately named playing style of 'winning ugly', to the 'theatrics' of outright cheats like Didier Drogba, to the total undermining of the manager by the board and the owner.

The opportunism of supporters to get behind a team that wins to their reluctance to back them when they are losing.

The graveyard-like atmosphere of their stadium on a match-day, to the destructive nature of their transfer policy and the lack of any kind of real identity.

Chelsea are the bad guys of modern football, and soon, City will be no different.

What kind of game are we watching? Where is the competition in football when the league winners are decided a month before the season begins during the transfer window?

How long do we have to wait before the day comes when we will just have to admit that the league is no longer a competition, it's a formality?

We are close to this already. Even now, it's only between two and four teams at most to win the league, and even then, its just a case of what order the other members of the 'Big Four' finish.

The day is coming when all competition and excitement will be removed from the greatest football league in the world, and the only thing left up for us as fans to speculate on will be by how many millions the transfer record is broken by this year.

We need a system akin to American Football, where players wages are capped so as to level the playing field for all teams. This would stop the destructive way in which massive clubs unsettle and pluck star players from smaller clubs with the promise of higher wages, only to give them a run out for cup-ties and friendlies.

Liverpool is guilty of this. We took Bolo Zenden, a quality player at Middlesborough, and raised his wages, but barely played him. 'Borough suffered without their quality winger, and two years later he was offloaded to Marsielle with nothing but a string of injuries and the memories of watching us win the FA Cup from the sidelines.

Chelsea, as you would expect, are chock full of stories like this. From Bolton's Tal Ben Haim, to City's Shaun Wright-Phillips, to Reading's Steve Sidwell, to AC Milan's Andrej Shevchenko (the most expensive flop since Cutthroat Island), Cheslea's record for ruining careers and ruining other teams is unmatched in recent times.

The best way to stop this is to introduce caps on wages, and players will go where they are needed, where they will play well and help their teams on to better things.

What good is a game if the winner is decided from the outset? Why see a play when you've read the book? What do we call an enterprise where the participants and the spectators all know the outcome already? Theatre.

I love the game of football; I love the club I support. Let's resolve this before the game loses all the great characteristics that made it the most popular sport in the world and lets put the competition, and the real entertainment, back into the EPL.