Two football events in 2008 stick out.
One was August’s preposterous, yet shockingly real, multi-million pound takeover of Manchester City by an Abu Dhabi-based consortium. That a perennial bridesmaid should be catapulted to become the world's richest club in an instant was jaw-dropping enough, but that it happened just as the roots of a global recession were taking hold, merely confirmed to the cynics that football has little truck with sanity.
Now the global behemoth of Manchester United and the Russian billions of Chelsea have been trumped, City are set to grab a host of star names in the January transfer window, having already stunned the soccer world by acquiring Robinho from Real Madrid.
Outside the elite, English & other European clubs are struggling to pay the wages needed to stay in the race, but as long as fans pay exorbitant ticket prices and fork out for satellite TV subscriptions, football's false economy will buck the global downturn.
The Big Four in the Premier League, two of whom contested 2008's UEFA Champions League final, enjoy a hegemony of success but do little to encourage responsible financial management amongst rivals without a queue of potential sugar-daddies at their doors: Man Utd owe £667m, Chelsea £578m, Liverpool £350 and Arsenal £260m, according to the latest figures.
That said, the start of the 2009/10 season will provide interesting reading when it comes to season-ticket renewals, while the proliferation of free online file-sharing should eat into the TV companies' profits. Football cannot escape the recession in conclusion, much as it refuses to admit. There is a natural cycle at work, and like the credit-fuelled economy and inflated UK house prices, the Premier League has been overvalued for too long and a correction is due.
The second memorable event was Spain winning the European Championship in June. What was so rewarding about Europe's sleeping giant finally awakening was that the Spanish played the most attractive football in the tournament. The best team was also the most beautiful one, and their victory over the cynical Italians and functional Germans should be a fillip to coaches devoted to expressive and not just percentage soccer.
International football remains a purer and more satisfying competition than the club game because talent cannot be bought in. The most an association can do to acquire players is to encourage a foreigner playing in their league to acquire citizenship and resist call-ups from his nation of origin, while scrambling to cap young players of dual nationality. It should be noted Spain's most influential player at Euro 2008, Marcos Senna, was Brazilian-born and bred.
What also makes international football the most engrossing is that it retains the local connection between fan and player the club game has largely lost. To that end it is tempting to lean towards supporting the Michel Platinis and Sepp Blatters of the soccer world, against whom the Arsene Wengers and Roman Abramoviches can appear at best provincial geniuses, merely devoted to Voltaire's exhortation to 'cultivate one's own garden', or at worst mercenaries denying responsibility to the world outside. Club v country rows grew louder in 2008 and will continue to form the dominant issues on the world soccer stage for the foreseeable future.
While world football can on the one hand appear an unashamedly greedy and vulgar carnival which grows ever less competitive by the year, the triumph of Spain in the Alps, the return to favour of home-grown managers in the Premier League and the unexpected early-season top-flight success of minnows like Hoffenheim in Germany, Hull City in England, Leixoes in Portugal and NAC Breda in the Netherlands should give us hope.
As we enter 2009 that the flame of the beautiful game may not be an eternal one, but it is far from extinguished.
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