Follow the money sure, but what about the football?

THERE will come a time when football isn’t mentioned once in this column.

Passes, shots and poor referees replaced by balance sheets and loan quotas. Red shirts usurped by red ink. The current fascination, some say obsession, with boardroom politics and financial matters continues to devour everything in its path.

All of it cloaked in this weird spy-novel subterfuge language, where words lose any trace of their original meaning.

The manager can say he is staying, the new owner can state categorically he is eager to work with the manager and find him the necessary funds for future success (because the £90 million he’s already spent is a droplet in the ocean, apparently).

Yet all that seems to do is trigger a stream of headlines and articles that speculate upon what the protagonists REALLY meant and more tiresome rumours about Madrid.

I suppose you could just blot the whole charade out and wait for some actual news, which admittedly is a little drastic. What would editors fill their back pages with in the meantime? It must be bewildering to Hicks and Gillett, since the average coach in US sport is considered one notch above the janitor, to see how the manager of the fourth best team in England has morphed into some deified overlord with a lot more gravitas than themselves.

Is it just Liverpool fans that do this? Even the likes of Ferguson has commented (complained?) on several occasions about the difference in the adoration he’s received compared to the four Reds managers he’s seen off, and the 5th he’s currently 21 points ahead of.

A glance across the park tells you we’re not the only zealots. The local press has recently been celebrating the five-year dominion of The Moyessiah. I’m not exaggerating.

Seriously: all that was missing was the 40-page colour supplement and the souvenir plate.

All you need to do apparently is average a mid-table place while never getting anywhere near a cup, and the blue boys instruct their propagandists to spread the word to the (ahem) masses that they are soooooo lucky to have him.

We could get terribly snooty here and suggest beggars can’t be choosers, but it’s indicative of a supporter’s calamitous aptitude for self-hypnosis that is widespread Rafa appears to be hurtling towards his second 30-point title deficit in three seasons, and the deafening mantra is that it’s merely a question of choking purse strings.

He’s averaging between £25 and £30 million spent every summer. How did that become peanuts? What line did we cross in the recent past that gives such madness free rein? It’s fashionable to blame United and Chelsea, but it’s also easy to forget that Ferguson’s success began with the purchases of Schmeichel, Irwin, Cantona and Kanchelskis.

While we bought James, Dicks, Saunders and Walters in similar roles. For a lot more money and far less success. You’d really prefer to have it the other way around.

Hasn’t it always been about good judgement? In fiscal terms Wenger fought Ferguson with one hand tied behind his back and both feet encased in concrete.

Yet his initial, meteoric surge to the top was aided by the likes of Vieira, Petit and Anelka. Benitez is always credited with exceptional access to and encyclopaedic knowledge of his home market, but is that backed up by hard evidence? I know I drone on about this all the time, but the man’s failure to get even one of his strikers to amass a respectable goal tally goes beyond expenditure.

Because of numerous reports linking us to an imminent Abramovich-style binge, we are being linked to some incredible names, rumours swallowed whole by the credulous majority.

Someone like Eto’o looks great in a flowing, adventurous team. Even if we found the king’s ransom to sign him (and that’s not very likely), it wouldn’t solve the problem; it just brings it into sharper focus.

Our great forwards of the past like Hunt, Rush and Fowler fed insatiably on chance after chance. Arguably the greatest of them all was Michael Owen, who kept up an astonishingly prolific streak for a regime that was virtually anti-football.

Is Rafa heading into the same cul-de-sac? No one can know for sure, no? Obviously, with two Spanish titles and both European trophies to his credit, he’s more right than most to resist the idea of seismic change.

Such resistance will surely lead to an unhappy conclusion, though. He’s lost players like Garcia and Kewell who can provide crucial moments of inspiration, and Gerrard is so lethargic these days he doesn’t even seem interested in England, judging by his demeanour in Israel.

But too often this season we’ve done just enough for victory and, once a goal down, looked utterly bereft of ideas.

And such ingenuity wasn’t for sale the last time I checked.