Always win when you’re singing

So where’s the credit crunch now? According to today’s papers, Manchester City are willing to pay double the world transfer record and pay £100 million to bring Brazilian international Kaka to Eastlands. That would rate one player as costing more than every other Premiership club’s squad and indeed more than over half the squads added together. Has the football world gone mad?

What does this do for English football? Does money bring success? Certainly Russian millions took Chelsea from being better than average to almost world beaters. But the advantages of Roman’s roubles haven’t beaten Sir Alex’s wiles, nor shown an overwhelming advantage over Arsene’s development policies (this season excepted). City manager Mark Hughes has seen the squad boosted by the arrival of Robinho, Jo, Shaun Wright-Phillips and this week Wayne Bridge for a total of over £70 million. Sheikh Mansour’s City takeover at the end of August brought delight to the blue side of Manchester, as their years of playing poor cousin to their Old Trafford neighbours seemed to be coming to an end. Yet they are languishing just above the Premier League’s relegation places. There must be fears in Eastlands that far from being the next Chelsea, City may become the next Leeds United.

Italian Prime Minister and AC Milan owner Silvio Berlusconi isn’t short of a bob or two, but he’s hardly in the same financial league as the consortium that bought City. Berlusconi sees Kaka as a trophy in his own right for Milan, although that must have taken a knock when he saw Kaka finish behind the Premiership’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Fenando Torres in FIFA’s World Player of the Year earlier this week. Allowing Kaka to leave the San Siro would be a real blow to the ego of Berlusconi and would prove that even a man with his level of arrogance and pride has his price.

If Berlusconi were to feel the loss of his talisman as a kick in a painful place, such a transfer would leave Mark Hughes fearing the traditional vote of support from City’s chairman, followed by the customary knife in the back. For anyone spending almost £200 million in one year, only to see the team knocked out of both Cups and still battling for Premiership survival come April would be sure to feel as sick as the proverbial parrot. And that can only be bad news for Hughes.

However Hughes’ misfortune would be good news for the game. It would prove that a club is more than just the wealth of the chairman and his friends and that a team cannot be substituted by an All-Stars 11. Bad news for billionaires, but good news for the game.