English football's New Order starts today in the North west, the cradle of the game
FROM MILL towns such as Bolton, Blackburn and Accrington, from ports like Liverpool and from the industrially energised city of Manchester, the North-west of England lays claim to being the cradle of the professional game that was given to the globe.
Some 120 years on, a very different world will return today to the North-west to play catch-up with a sport that is simultaneously changing and unchanged from its 1888 Football League roots. The anticipation is bulging. Rarely can an international break have felt like such a brake.
It begins at lunchtime at Anfield where a worldwide audience will be consumed by an appetite to see two cities, two traditions and two of England's most successful clubs collide once again. Liverpool will meet Manchester United for the 151st time in the league. It is old world rivalry and fans from Singapore to Salford to San Francisco know its meaning.
Then, four hours later, 33 miles to the east, the New World begins. Again it will be a moment of global significance and again it should make for compelling viewing: Manchester City versus Chelsea, the richest-tasting football ever poured.
August 2008 may well be written about at some length in the future. As the month accelerated towards its end and the closure of another transfer window, massive movement occurred. Dimitar Berbatov jumped from Tottenham to Manchester United and is expected to make his debut this afternoon. It could be a season-shaper of a transfer.
It should have dominated headlines every day since. It's just that the same night, Robinho, a 24-year-old Brazilian employed by Real Madrid, moved to the same town as Berbatov except that Robinho joined Manchester City, not the European Champions. Dimitar eased into the shadows with his burning cigarette, Robinho held up a blue City shirt, and smiled.
He was not alone. Fairly pleasingly for a country unimpressed by Chelsea's wealth and their use of it in skewing the market, and from there the Premier League title, Robinho snubbed Chelsea to move to City. The fee was just over €40 million. Like Berbatov, Robinho is in line for a debut today, against Chelsea. These are big-bang signings.
The reason for Robinho being in City's sky-blue is, of course, money. The following morning, as Robinho awoke to find himself belonging to a club that last won the league 16 years before he was born on a different continent, the Abu Dhabi-based company, Abu Dhabi United Group Investment and Development Limited, completed its takeover of a club formed in 1887 as Ardwick FC.
If Robinho's mind boggled, you could understand. Again he was not alone. City were as Manchester as cotton and canals. Now Eastlands is known as Middle Eastlands and English football has changed.
If it morphed the day in June 2003 that Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea from Ken Bates, the Abu Dhabi intervention was another level on the spiral. Suddenly Chelsea are no longer the richest kids in town. Even Manchester City, good, old Blue Moon, let's-have-a-laugh-at-how- rubbish-we-are Manchester City, can outbid Chelsea. Abramovich may have the finance and status of a city-state but now a country has effectively bought a chunk of the Premier League and the stakes are raised. Who's next? That is the question, or one of them.
It will be asked long into the night should City beat Chelsea and television pictures show Arabian owners celebrating as if they always fancied Richard Dunne and have now snared him.
In the second half of their 3-0 victory at Sunderland a fortnight ago, City were more than useful without Robinho and their odds of 66 to 1 to win the league are generous if January is going to witness more galactic signings. Those odds will be sliced tonight if Chelsea go home beaten and wondering about a new order.
It is this type of thought which shows how engrossing it all can be, even if at the same time there is a part of you distressed by the sheer mercenary nature of it all.
Due to escalating bills for gas and electricity, phone-ins across England this week have focused on the idea that concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the few might not be the most clever trick after all. There is an appetite for redistribution.
Yet into this context walk men from Abu Dhabi who struck oil. At Liverpool - and Everton - there may be increasing anxiety about their respective ownerships, but at City the Sold Out signs went up early for today's game and at least for a couple of hours no-one will point out the alternative meaning. It is too big a show to miss.
Besides, ever since professionalism dawned, it has always been about money and opportunism. The man who formed the first great team of all time, Preston North End's Invincibles, was one Major William Sudell. He was jailed for three years for embezzling £5,000 from PNE. Rather more recently, how did Blackburn Rovers win the Premiership in 1995? They broke economic records to buy Alan Shearer.
City's record transfer outlay at the time of Shearer's move was for Keith Curle. It is a long way from Curle to Robinho but the road has been travelled. Meanwhile down a different path in Lancashire this afternoon, Accrington Stanley host Notts County. Notts County are the world's oldest league club, but who's watching?
