Manchester City is like a black hole that has opened up in the fabric of the Premier League. Sucking mass, masses of expensive players and media attention, it leaves many fans unsure about how to approach the club’s awakening and limitless powers. Some laugh. Some wince. Most shake their heads, confused and afraid, especially those millions of fans of any of the now comparatively-less-rich Big Four, which constitute most of the Premier League fans here in America and elsewhere outside England. This is understandable. Manchester City’s profligate spending has driven up transfer prices, undermined other teams’ prized resources, and presented a serious threat to the Big Four’s establishment and their lock on Champions League places.

However grotesque City’s expenditures seem, I say come with them! Pour on the gravy and turn up the heat! Or something like that. Modern soccer welcomes lavish spending to create a better and more attractive product. And City is relishing the chance to revolutionize a club overnight. Whatever their history, teams that spend more succeed more, with very few exceptions. This gets truer and grosser every year. Although soccer is a team sport, it is also as pure a “players’ sport” as exists. Put the best players on the field, you win. At least, I’ve always thought so.

City is gleefully testing this “theory”, as Chelsea did a few years ago, before a few years of success ingratiated that club into the Established Order. Unlike Chelsea, however, City’s is playing with capital as liquid as oil – a very real Arabian cave of treasure that isn’t tied up in business ventures or stocks. And City’s owners are making a messier and more offensive storm than Chelsea ever did. They even had the gall to try to buy-out the Blues’ loyal captain, John Terry. They offered apparently blank checks to Kaka and Ronaldo amongst others. And I don’t blame the Al-Nahyan royal family or the club for doing so. The owners are taking full advantage of the league’s (or more generally European soccer’s) lax and negligent financial policing.

City’s unchecked injection of play money should continue a few of the league’s trends. It should continue to increase the quality of the league at its highest stratosphere, amassing talent that will ensure high-level competition and entertainment that will pay off via its worldwide popularity and increasing value. At the same time, however, it should continue to bloat the already warped financial structure of the league, further separating rich and successful clubs from the bottom feeders, the poorer clubs whose best resources get pillaged and ransacked to feed towering predators.

While it’s easy to ignore the dangers of such a naturally competitive marketplace, as long as angelic billionaires or conglomerates of millionaires continue to foot the bill for their creations, the league has seen increasing concern with teams’ financial instability. Because so many clubs need to operate at losses to succeed or even compete, not living within their means but requiring what Arsene Wenger calls “financial doping”, their financial footing appears increasingly suspect. What happens when the “doping-agent” dries up, or when the club can’t find another sugar daddy to buy, to continue to push the absurd cycle? These have become very real concerns for a few clubs while others remain naive in thinking that insolvency can’t happen to them.

So how long can this last? I don’t know, and that’s for brighter economic minds than mine to figure out. I’m just hoping that City’s absurd spending, which clearly functions as the most effective and easy path to success, will prompt more debates about the league’s financial stability vs. its competitive stability. And hopefully financial reform will follow. It promises to be a complex and painful process, but it is a necessary one if we truly want more than the same richest few teams to have a shot at winning anything.

In the meantime, I’m not the only one curious about how messy City’s twisted project will get on the field. Some are already predicting a debacle, laughing at City’s illogical and unsystematic acquisitions. I’m not. I’m impressed that City snatched the caliber of players it did – a few world-class misfits and a few stalwart players who pledged their loyalties elsewhere until … wait, so I could like buy a Bentley and a Burnley? I’m also rooting for the backwards way City built a team, from front to back. This flouts most conservative conventional soccer wisdom, which relies on the tired cliché that defense wins championships. Of course, City’s coach Mark Hughes has admitted that he still wants another world-class central defender like Everton’s Jolian Lescott, and he still might get one. But right now he’s got such a surplus of attacking talent that he’s loaning startlet strikers like Jo and Daniel Sturridge to his competitors, Everton and Chelsea. How the hell is he going to make room for Emmanuel Adebayor, Carlos Tevez, Roque Santa Cruz, Robinho, and Craig Bellamy? Not to mention Martin Petrov and Sean Wright Phillips and Steven Ireland, arguably City’s best player for the last two seasons.

Such a top-heavy team needs streamlining to wield itself effectively against the organized defenses of the top four. But even if applied with childish whimsy, such a swirling mass of talent and goal scoring credentials should damage the best teams in the league. If applied with enough precision and restraint, then City has the firepower to crack the top four. But I’m just as curious to see if the arms race that Manchester City has amplified will prompt the sport’s governing bodies to make a more earnest effort to streamline financial structures and policies. Somehow I think this is less likely. So lets all appreciate the chance we have to watch money burn in all its sparkling and time-searing glory … ◊

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