What not to wear...

And so AIG's financial situation across the water has ensured that yet another sponsor's name will adorn Manchester United's jerseys from 2011. The current sponsorship deal with the insurance 'giants' nets United 14 milion sterling a year and the ceasing of this particular relationship ensures that another fiscal organisation's involvement with a sports franchise comes to a rather abrupt end. AIG have already ended their involvement with the US Davis Cup tennis team.

Look a little deeper though and shirt sponsorship has long provided a 'quick peep' into distinctive social and cultural norms. If we rewind to the early nineties, it was the world of electronics that had global communities simultaneously agog and companies like JVC, Commodore and Sharp snapped up the big deals with then English First Division sides Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United respectively. Though these clubs had begun to buy into the advent of overseas sponsors (as had, bizarrely enough, Coventry City through their affiliation with Peugeout), strong and traditional British 'ways of life', mostly beverage-related, found their names on the fronts of jerseys - most famously Carlsberg (Liverpool), McEwans (Blackburn and Glasgow Rangers) and Greenalls (Newcastle - who also pin-pointed Newcastle Brown Ale as a key shirt sponsor in the mid-nineties). It was clear that commercialisation was the last thing on club chairman's minds and the provincial town-isms belied what the Premier League would become - Middlesbrough's deal with the Evening Gazette was terribly endearing though somewhat worrysome and West Ham's partnership with Dagenham Motors was a script-writers dream.

Such innocence though existed in more 'exotic' locations too. On the continent, respective countries tended to adopt the same approach to sponsorship though on a more cosmopolitan level as clubs identifed key national treasures as their perfect partner. In Serie A, these tended to be famous national food companies - think Danone (Juventus), Parmalat (Parma) and Barilla (Roma). Memorably, Fiorentina carried the name of ice-cream makers Sammontana on their shirts during the mid-nineties. In the Bundesliga, the heavy-hitters paid tribute to Germany's powerful industrious heritage - Bayern Munich proudly wore Opel's name across the front of their shirts for well over a decade. When Mattias Sammer lifted the 1997 European Cup as captain of Borussia Dortmund meanwhile, it was the name of local insurance company Die Continentale that jumped out from those bright neon shirts.

But, the days of local or even national companies putting their name to a local side are long gone. As the financial malaise continues to eat away at the beautiful game, clubs have spent the last decade tying down lucrative sponsorship deals with whoever can provide them with the most income. Tradition, history, heritage seem to be buzz-words of a lost generation ago but, in fact, it was a generation ago when the process of meaningless affiliation begun. In the mid-nineties, Paris St. Germain maximised their profits by agreeing for two sponsors to adorn their red and blue torsos as the name of French beer-manufacturer Tourtel sat below that of, firstly, US computer company Commodore and the following season, Spanish car giants SEAT. Any trace of French shirt sponsorship with the club was wiped when OPEL came on board in 1995.

The 'lost years' for shirt sponsorship came with the new millennium with clubs attempting to appeal to Generation X+. Arsenal and Manchester United ended 14 and 16 year old deals with JVC and Sharp respectively and signed instead with SEGA and VODAFONE. In Italy meanwhile, the newly crowned Scudetto champions Lazio joined forces with Siemens after previous deals with Italian food company Cirio and the Bank of Rome. Inter's continued Milanese relationship with tyre magnates Pirelli is merely the exception that proves the rule.

Like Inter though, other clubs have taken great pride in the way they deal with shirt sponsorship, not least Catalan giants Barcelona. In September 2006, the infamously traditionally sponsor-less club agreed a five-year 'collaborative agreement' with UNICEF, the terms of which sees Barca carry the UNICEF logo on their jerseys while annually contributing €1.5 million to the organisation's projects. It had been believed Barcelona were ready to sign an agreement with Austrian online betting company 'BetandWin' (BWin) but the deal fell through when the club felt it would be uncomfortable to be associated with such an entity.

Real Madrid didn't seem to mind however - in February 2007, they signed a 75 million euro contract with BWin and with that, the modern-day ruthlessness of shirt sponsorship had been confirmed - the pure, evangelical, vacant strips of the greatest club in the world tarnished with the ugliness of such a morbid and irrelevant partner. The conduct of both Madrid and Barcelona regarding their respective sponsorship deals is striking and in an age when perhaps the relationship between a jersey and the name that's emblazoned across its front may not seem important anymore, it's refreshing to know that some people still care.

More on Kaka...

To keep with the football finances theme, here's a piece from When Saturday Comes back in 1995. When things appear gloomy, nostalgia, it seems, is the order of the day:

Remember Steve Daley? If you do, then it’s because his transfer from Wolves in 1979 cost Manchester City over £1 million and, arguably, Malcolm Allison his job. His wasn’t the first, or last, seven-figure move of the time, but Daley’s is the name most often recalled to sum up that frenzied period, principally because he was hugely overpriced: a good enough player for what was then the First Division, but never a serious contender for international caps. His name comes to mind because the transfer market is as mad now as it was in 1979. A bargain these days is any player moving between Premier League clubs for less than £2m.

The Collymore case illustrates one of the causes of the grotesque inflation in fees, a new outbreak of a particularly virulent disease that occasionally strikes at football and for which there is no known cure: macho shopping. Everton had barely finished parading the Cup around Wembley than chairman Peter Johnson was excitedly burbling to all and sundry about how much money would be made available to Joe Royle to buy players. The team had had their turn in the spotlight, and now the chairman wanted his. He let it be known that an £8m payout was well within his range and the press were told all about the faxed bid for that amount sent to Forest. A year ago, Everton or Liverpool could have got three or four Premier League players for the eight million they were prepared to spend on just one.

Other clubs not bankrolled by millionaires now feel under pressure to keep up. Alan Sugar, playing up to his self-appointed role as the sceptical outsider astonished by what he continues to discover about the football industry, recently suggested that the latest round of over-spending will widen the gap between the top few clubs and the rest, with championships and cups becoming the exclusive preserve of the elite within the elite. While some of the bigger clubs have made themselves vulnerable, as in 1979, those courting the largest disasters are the underachievers, eternally hoping for better things – more than half the Premier League, in other words. Sir John Hall and others repeatedly talk the language of free market economics in relation to football, and what we’re seeing now should be a familiar sight to economists everywhere – though one about which many of them tend to keep quiet. A passing historian has just told us that in the 17th century the Netherlands was brought to its financial knees by a frenzy of speculation in the value of tulip bulbs; that might be hard to imagine, but after Warren Barton and Stan Collymore’s England debuts, arguably it’s even harder to get your head around the idea that many football clubs are going bananas and risking huge sums of money on a couple of English players. But it’s happening, and the fever has spread to produce an interest in more exotic varieties as well. Worse still, it’s a racing certainty that some of these big transfers will go wrong: there just aren’t enough trophies or places in Europe to enable all this summer’s headline-makers to finish the season with smiles on their faces.

Just as it’s hard to sympathize with the ex-millionaires who threw themselves out of office blocks as a result of the Wall Street Crash, so those managers who get their fingers badly burnt shouldn’t come to us looking for tea and sympathy. But just as those (apocryphal?) American stockbrokers apparently landed on the occasional innocent passerby, so the inhabitants of the lower levels in football have something to fear. The annual turnover from transfers last season was squillions more than, to pick a year at random, 1992, when Blackburn got promoted, but a smaller proportion of it went to the lower divisions than ever before. And this summer has been worse.Several smaller clubs have reaped the benefits of sell-on clauses which entitle them to a share of the fee when a player they have sold moves on again. But if clubs are spending less time seeking out talent at lower levels then there is less and less likelihood of them unearthing players like Warren Barton (who was good value when he joined Wimbledon from Maidstone), Chris Armstrong (originally with Wrexham), or Stan Collymore (a Palace reserve whose career was revived at Southend).

In their panic to buy big, Premier League clubs just aren’t thinking straight. Did Arsenal, for example, really have to pay as much as £7.5m for Dennis Bergkamp? Consider his situation. He had an unhappy time in Italy and wasn’t going to stay. Where else might he go? Many European clubs are a short of cash at the moment or else have a full quota of overseas players, and he’s too young to wind down his career at home in Holland. His price would surely have come down quickly because, though Inter would be keen to recoup the money spent on Ince, they wouldn’t want to be stuck paying the wages of a reserve who didn’t want to be there anyway (a problem that could repeat itself with Ince – and may also be resolved by Arsenal again forking out in a year’s time).It is impossible to predict when the transfer mania will end. As with boom-and-bust cycles in real life, there isn’t an obvious solution, because people always want to believe that this time it will be different, and there’s no persuading them otherwise. So we’re going to sit back, stick pins in dolls of those managers and chairmen we’d most like to see get their comeuppance, and always wear hard hats when we go to grounds with nice, high roofs from which people can jump.

We've come a long way, baby...

Because of lots of different things going on, I've been incredibly lazy in getting around to regular updates over the last month - deepest apologies.

But let's get right back into it.

The 100million pound man:

So, it has come to this. Should any of us be surprised that in 2009, a player is reported to be the subject of a 100% serious 100 million pound bid from a Premier League club.? The answer is no but, that hasn't stopped miscellaneous red-top and broadsheet hyperbole from being in awe of the story.

The hard fact remains that everything is eventual. When Brian Clough signed Trevor Francis for a million pounds from Birmingham City in 1979, people scoffed - 'No player is worth 1 million pounds...ever'. Fast forward thirty years and the English Premier League, maybe even global association football in general, find themselves in a position whereby one million pounds gets you a modern day equivalent of a bag of jerseys.

It is interesting to note that it's only been in the last fifteen years that the logic regarding transfer fees has ceased to be even vaguely mentioned in the same breath as 'business acumen'. Rewind to 1993 and Alan Shearer moved from Southampton to Blackburn for a then British record of 3.3 million quid. Andy Cole smashed that record two years later when he joined Manchester United from Newcastle for 5.5 million plus Keith Gillespie...The reason why the Premier League worked within these financial restrictions was because there were clear financial restrictions in place - if clubs required to splash a couple of million on a player then they had to put two on the transfer list.

The way deals were done in England at this time was still incredibly innocent and naive - but in hindsight, refreshingly so. Sir Alex Ferguson tells the story of how Eric Cantona made the move to Old Trafford from Elland Road. The Scot received a call from Leeds United about the possibility of Dennis Irwin moving to Yorkshire. Ferguson dismissed the proposed move but enquired about Eric Cantona. By the end of the day, Fergie had got his man - no fuss, no red tape, no agent fees, no merchandising clause, no last-minute hijacking from other clubs.

So what has happened regarding the transfer of players? There's now a media circus when a deal is struck between two clubs for the most medial of footballers usually because the fee involved is the season budget for lower league clubs. Over the last five years or so, the money has moved to the Premier League. For decades, the best players in the world were drawn to Serie A, the Budesliga, La Liga but never England. Why move there? Old Blighty, stiff upper lips, crumpets and tea, the Queen - no thanks. These players preferred Ferraris, super-model girlfriends, mansions overlooking a Wonder of the World. Alan Shearer returned to his hometown and signed for Newcastle for 15 million pounds in the summer of 1996 - the deal was the world transfer record...for about two days. (The original) Ronaldo moved to Barcelona from PSV in 1996 for 18 million quid. Suddenly, a deal that Newcastle had been finalising and bank-balancing precariously for twelve months previous was ripped to shreds in the blink of an eye.

The Premier League tried in vain to catch up - clubs attempted to entice glamorous continental players. Instead, clubs got pros coming to the end of their careers - Fabrizio Ravenelli was a super signing for Middlesbrough - scoring a hat-trick on his debut against Liverpool. But it always seemed such an incredibly weird relationship between player and club - League of Gentlemen-esque. Ravanelli didn't exactly warm himself to the supporters or his team-mates by criticising the training regime and the area of Middlesbrough itself. Hutton Rudby was a long way from Turin and it was clear that clubs would need time to get the process right...

With the concentration of power now permanently fixed within the Premier League, it's taken the FA a decade to establish the League as the self-proclaimed 'best in the world' but are we talking quality of football or quality of life for its players? When Manchester City fork out 10 million quid for an out-of-favour full back Wayne Bridge (signed by Chelsea for 7 million when he was first-choice) and when Liverpool splash over 20 million on Robbie Keane, one can only look on in amazement. Even Manchester United were held to ransom by Spurs when they signed Dimi Berbatov - paying, at least, between 5 and 7 million more than they should have.

There appears very little research as to the overall costing of modern day footballers across the Barclays Premier League. Why? Because they don't have to worry about the price. Where does the proposed Kaka fee for 100 million plus originate? How does a club come up with a bid like that? When Zizou Zidane moved to Real Madrid for 46.7 million, the fee appeared bulked up with clauses and various other financial elements. 100 million seems like a figure plucked from thin air and it's incredibly worrying when the richest businessmen in the world conduct such unhealthy and bizarre business practices as fanciful and badly-researched as the proposed Kaka deal.

Half of me wants Kaka to come and play for City. Because when the deal falls flat on its face and the club are relegated, perhaps the lunatics will have eventually left the asylum.