Everton's class trumps Manchester City money, but Chinese investment isn't necessarily bad

Classy: Deulofeu and Barkley lit up the Riverside Stadium on Tuesday evening
(Nigel Roddis/Getty Images)
Patrick Barclay2 December 2015

What is football really about? The 28-pass move, featuring no fewer than six contributions from Ross Barkley and dazzling footwork by the equally exciting young Gerard Deulofeu, that culminated in Romelu Lukaku’s goal for an increasingly, and heart-warmingly, classy Everton performance at Middlesbrough last night? Or the deal that has delivered 13 per cent of Manchester City to China?

Call me an old fogey but I know which has me shovelling adjectives and adverbs like a demented fireman — and it’s definitely not the one about global reach, emerging mega-markets and unrivalled growth platforms.

Yes, football is a business, but its point, surely, is to create a form of popular art that upholds standards worthy of passage down the generations.

Everton, under Roberto Martinez, have just a chance of doing that. Even I don’t go back as far as Dixie Dean but, just as the constructive game of Harry Catterick was recreated by Howard Kendall, the constructive tradition of Steven, Reid, Bracewell and Sheedy is now respected by Martinez’s young maestros in the making, under the glad eye of old Evertonian chairman Bill Kenwright. Clubs of the scale of City, however, may yet thwart them.

Now that Financial Fair Play is collapsing, it is only a matter of time before the £100million barrier is broken and, if I were a club with that sort of money and more, John Stones would be on my shopping list along with Deulofeu — if Barcelona could be persuaded to sell their option — Seamus Coleman and, maybe, Barkley and Lukaku, too.

Yes, even Barcelona will be concerned by developments in east Manchester. But that is not necessarily unhealthy, for what City seem genuine in trying to build is a tradition of their own, a new Barcelona, with former Barcelona executives and a training complex designed to supersede La Masia.

If the Chinese consortium are buying into that, globally reaching for the goodness of football, they are most welcome.

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