[RoboRiise]

The best point that article makes is the one about "whatever money" beacuse it finally gives a name, however cliched, to the aspect of the Chelsea phenomenon that irks me the most.

It's never been the money they can spend on transfers for me. Newcastle regularly spend outrageous money to bring players in, Leeds took the piss with the amount of money they spent, United have signed two players for £30m each in recent years and our own spending under Houllier was hardly prudent.

Also, there are plenty of good players out there for every position on the pitch, it's not like we're all competing for the same two or three players. No one club can offer enough opportunities to play to make signing any more than three top-class internationals for a given position viable (two, more realistically) so to a degree the market has in-built limits.

No. With Chelsea , it's the fact that spending that much on a player isn't a gamble like it is for most other clubs.

Leeds put everything on black and the house won, Ferguson as a recehorse owner is more canny and went for an each way, which as usual just about covered his stake by providing a decreased proportion of winnings and we hit a run of back luck and ended up in a situation where we could still pay the bills, but needed to start putting out house in order sooner rather than later.

The old adage about gambling is that you should never bet more than you can afford to lose. For Chelsea, that figure is so much higher than for any other club in the Premier Leage that it might as well be infinite. Wright-Phillips is probably the best example; it's not that I can't see Rafa (or the club) spending £20m on a player, but if we did he'd have to be the most nailed-on, dead cert ever, because I don't think Rafa would want to spend £20m of the club's money otherwise.

Chelsea can afford to have a punt on a player for £20m. They can afford to pay £10m (if you believe the press) to another club to deal with tapping up allegations over a member of the non-playing staff and they can afford to pay one of their main title rivals £12m to smooth out "difficulties" in a transfer, even when the main "difficulty" appears to be that he signed a contract which was illegal according to FIFA's rules and thus utterly non-enforceable in the first place.

This is why the Chelsea argument that football is a business and that as a successful business they can do what they like angers me so much. They are emphatically not a business by any conventional understanding of the term. In a viable business, the money comes from success. In Chelsea's case, the success comes from the money. They are not a self-sustaining enterprise, rather they are the plaything of a rich benefactor and just like Watford and Blackburn before them, they will amount to nothing at all in the wider annals of the game. They are a flash in the pan, a football "event" for the X-Factor generation and in ten years time I will laugh at how they faded into the obscurity they so richly deserved.