Ian Farrell grins and bears it as his team's wealth threatens to unbalance global football and alienate their own supporters

A day after the collapse of their audacious bid for Kaka, Manchester City spent a whopping £14 million on Mr Craig Bellamy, prompting Sky Sports into perhaps the least appropriate ever use of the phrase “soften the blow”. It seemed that after four months of rumour and bravado, the era of Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the Abu Dhabi United Group had well and truly begun.

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Ryman League Division One North isn't normally awash with transfer scandal, however intrigue is rife after Ware FC lost manager, assistant, physio and the entire playing squad in less than a season. Si Hawkins reports

West Ham and Portsmouth fans may have spent the winter transfer window ­worrying about losing their finer players to ­better-off rivals, but at least those players left one by one, and for hefty fees. Far below the Premier League, in a leafy home counties commuter town, followers of the once upwardly-mobile Ware FC entered the new year bemoaning the loss of an entire squad, the manager, his assistant, and even the physio. Rarely can a promising club have unravelled so quickly.

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Phil Town describes the man voted as the world's best player

The Portuguese media were convinced pretty much across the board that Cristiano Ronaldo had his name on the FIFA Player of the Year award. Just for good measure though, sports daily A Bola felt a little push might help and organised an online petition, signed by 123,559 people, which was sent to each of the 207 football associations of the voting countries. “Cristiano Ronaldo in Zürich to be crowned the best in the world,” chanced the same paper on the day of the ceremony.

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Setanta and ITV fail to impress during their, let's face it, poor coverage of the prestigious competition. Cameron Carter watches 

Setanta are enjoying their first crack at the FA Cup Sponsored By E.on and it looks like they have pulled out all the stops, bearing in mind they don’t have many stops available. To reflect on the events of the fourth round, Sports Saturday brought together a nice young chairman, two ex-pros and a “betting expert”. Now, I’m all for ­different angles on the game and a change from a couple of old players saying “Like you said…” and “Like Steve said…”, but a betting expert is probably not going to add much to the debate other than a flurry of predictable odds and the faint aroma of Golden Virginia. 

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Fergie and Rafa entered into a war of words and unsurprisingly the Scot comes out on top

Given that the national press is chock full of inane pop psychology, it’s a surprise that none of the pseudo-scientists who get paid for stating the obvious has yet written a book about the “mind games” of football managers. Whenever one of Manchester United’s title rivals stumble, Sir Alex Ferguson is credited with crafty psychological manipulation of his managerial counterparts. For a few weeks in January, Rafa Benítez was decreed to have gone mad, firstly for holding a press conference in which he read out some prepared statements listing the ways in which the United manager escapes censure from the authorities – “the most vicious attack ever on Sir Alex”, said the Sun – then for making a series of supposedly unintelligible comments about Liverpool’s dip in form that saw them fall away from the top of the table.

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