Okay. Is Arsenal a shopping store and the both Manchester clubs and Barcelona being its richest customers? Arsenal along with A.C Milan are selling their star players and in the process decreasing their own position in the table and the extravagant spenders in Manchester City, Paris Saint Germain, Barcelona and Chelsea are ready to buy the players for the sky tall price without a bargain. As with the case of Cesc Fabregas, a home grown Arsenal hero and Alex Song, a person who provided the most assists in the 2011-12 season for the gunners, Arsenal have been made a player shop rather than a football club. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a player known for his variant jerseys across Europe, went to PSG maybe for a challenge but also maybe for money. PSG have been the biggest spenders after being taken over by the Qatar investment authority. They, after having bought the likes of Ibrahimovic, Thiago Silva and David Beckham, are showing signs of being a European giant in the making. Real Madrid are not on the spenders list just because they don’t sign any player that is playing good. They only target the players they need. They sign a star player every year following their Galactico policy.
Manchester City won the league and brought immense riches to the Arabi billionaire Sheikh Mansour. The owner was able to bring together the unrecognized, underappreciated, talented and young players to become one of the elite teams in Europe. This is something we have to give him credit for because before his arrival very less people knew the likes of David Silva, Joe Hart, James Milner and Edin Dzeko. He has brought together some of the finest pieces of players in Europe and has been able to cook the recipe to Instant Success.
PSG on the other hand are buying experienced, talented and a bit older players if compared to the players bought by Manchester City. They spent money like water and still lost the league to Montpellier who had a budget quarter to that of PSG. Everybody says that Real Madrid buy superstars and get success and Barcelona makes success bringing stars. Barcelona bought Alex Song, Cesc Fabregas, Alexis Sanchez, David Villa and even Gerrard Pique was bought from Manchester United. Their recent important signing being that of Jordi Alba from Valencia. The graduates from the La Masia are some of the best players in Spain but one has to accept the fact that Barcelona also buys Super players. Real Madrid on the other hand often buys a single player every year who plays a very important role in their game in the years to come.
Chelsea, the European Champions were hungry of success and bought as many players as they can emptying the bank account of Russian Oligarch, Ramon Abrahimovich. As a result of which the man who brought them their first European Silverware, Roberto Di Matteo, was sacked for not being properly able to rotate the team. They added to their squad some great young prospects by adding Oscar, Hazard, Azpilicueta and many others to get success but were unable to even survive the champions league group stage in their first season as the European Champions.
The lesser known clubs are not being able to get the Arabi Sheikhs as their new owners and are never being able to rise as a force to be reckoned with, whereas the bigger clubs are grabbing the richest owners and in the process are not giving a chance for the smaller clubs to rise to the highest level. Some players are getting salaries as high as 200k’s a week but the small club’s biggest players sometimes even have to do a part time job to fill their stomach. Money in football is something which, in a way is a boon and in the other way is a bane.
