If you can’t beat them, buy them

Our man inside the game is braced for an onslaught of Premier League spending as clubs compensate for poor coaching by expensively filling the holes in their squads.

Football is incorrigible really. When some muddled lunatic cruelly fractured everyday life in Manchester and beyond last week, I wondered when official England’s observance of grief rituals would give way to the itch to get back to business as usual. Would it be Labour clambering up the polls while divided against itself. Would it be Theresa May with her tinny Thatcher impersonation. Maybe the sensitive souls of UKIP would be back among us spreading their slurry.

Instead, it was Manchester City, once the self-proclaimed people’s club of Manchester who got the big show back on the road. Having matched United’s half million donation to the Manchester emergency fund, City cheerily announced that they had spent proper money, £43.6 million of it, on a 22-year-old Monaco player. If you can’t beat them, buy them is the new managerial imperative.