Are English Clubs Victims of Their Own Wealth?

Flicking through the Sky Sports News app is the classic way for an emotionally-repressed sober British man to pass a bored afternoon, or a Tinder date arranged in more agreeable hours. Sheffield United have beaten Fleetwood Town with a late goal from Stefan Scougall. Mick McCarthy wants to keep Tyrone Mings at Ipswich. Stuart McCall is after three points from the difficult trip to Livingston. It is pure, emotionless information, taken on board in solemn silence and dignity.

That's changed somewhat in the past couple of months. The whole experience should provide a refuge from election season, but when it seems the same madness and demagoguery has spread from Nigel Farage to Paul Merson, something weird is going on. England has a 'European problem', and nobody really has a clue what to do about it.

Of course, we're used to this every time the England national side play like the rabble they are, but it's weird to see it spread to clubs. Arsenal managed to perfect predictability in their fuck-up-and-almost-pull-it-out-of-the-bag act against Monaco; Liverpool and Manchester City were shown up as being a league below the best; and Chelsea lost to a good-but-not-great PSG side.

Things are so bad now that there's talk of losing the fourth Champions League spot, and while the league gets richer and the top teams can afford to buy a world-class player or two every year, they're less effective for it. It makes no sense, and it's led to paranoia and delusion, talk of rebuilding academies, doing what them Germans and Spanish are so good at: thinking of all the unborn Harry Kanes like a deranged pro-lifer.

It's worth questioning whether too much money is really a good thing. Weight of resources doesn't show quite as much when you can only put eleven players on the pitch, and it's quite telling that of all England's big clubs, it's the richest, Manchester City, who've not been able to improve one iota over the past four years. They've spent over £300m on bland, uninspiring dross, imagining that Fernando can compete with Sergio Busquets, or Alvaro Negredo is going to challenge Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Other clubs have fared better: Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal have all made genuine bids to sign world-class players that elevate their teams. Had City spent their money on Alexis Sanchez, Mesut Ozil, or Diego Costa instead of Swansea's best player, they would be in a far better state. Yet none of those clubs have gotten anywhere closer either.

There's something else at play here. Building a football team is a complex, inexact science that, when managerial changes are factored in, usually has to be done by several men over a period of years. It's about fitting together a balanced team, sure, but mentality, leadership, fitness, squad size, and any number of unquantifiable factors come into it. Even Real Madrid, who long ago opted for the policy of throwing staggering amounts of money at world-class players and hoping they would fit together, have seen little reward. It goes against logic, but it's proven time and time again that the problem cannot be solved with money alone.

Instead, genius tends to come from times of desperation, where improvisation and resourcefulness are needed. For every plan carried out by level headed Germans on clean paper in an air-conditioned boardroom, there are two that were thrown together by a balding Italian because all of his strikers were out injured and he had three games coming up in a week. It's the only way new things come about. Barcelona became one of the greatest sides of all time after producing a generation of youngsters that included Xavi and Iniesta. This dominant midfield pairing destroyed everything they came up against, despite consisting of two players who weren't fast, couldn't tackle, and rarely got on the scoresheet.

Think of any recent great team: Barcelona, Spain 2008-2012, United's treble-winners, the Invincibles, France 1998. All of these were wildly different. However they have plenty of things in common - and usually most of the following: a legendary group or pairing, a star player, a crop of homegrown talent, and an identifiable way of playing the game. Chelsea have none of this. Neither do Arsenal. Manchester City are as far away from it as they were in the days of Shaun Goater. At least Kinkladze was fun.

The fact that nebulous, flowery stuff like this often does matter is one of the joys of the game. It's why we're not ruled by stats nerds, and appointing Tim Sherwood can be an idea that doesn't end in disaster and riots. It is simple enough that a child can understand it, yet complex enough to be forever beyond total comprehension.

The 2008 Champions League final looked like confirmation that a new era of English dominance was upon us, but it's proved to be the high-water mark of the Premier League in a game that's changed drastically since and left it behind. In that game we saw the last great Premier League back-four, frontline, and midfield. There have been good ones since, but nothing has come close to in-the-prime Ferdinand and Vidic, or Essien and Lampard, or Tevez-Rooney-Ronaldo. And these were on the lower edges of greatness, none of them candidates for the all-time best. Even the back-four included Wes Brown, for fuck's sake.

The decline from that zenith doesn't seem to be steep, with the teams looking to have just as many star players – it's not like Scotland, where we've gone from Larsson, Caniggia, Gattuso and Laudrup to Ian Black and Charlie Mulgrew. There are still great players. But the decline is a real one - from total dominance to total irrelevance in the space of a few years, a change in fortune so rapid and extreme that it is only, paradoxically, matched by the increase in income of the clubs since.

Perhaps it makes a simple kind of sense. Wealth and prudent spending haven't exactly always gone hand-in-hand. For every Warren Buffet there's a Michael Carroll, and Premier League clubs in 2015 are a lot closer to a dickhead lottery-winners than sensible businessmen. Maybe a bit of austerity would do them some good.