Business of Sport: Malcolm Glazer may be behind the bid for Manchester United Football Club but he may face stiff opposition, not only from the fans' group Shareholders United but also from a rival bid from a consortium of British businessmen who do not want to see the world's most famous club fall into the hands of a businessman who has never been to Old Trafford and whose club, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have the highest ticket prices in the NFL.
The ongoing court case between the boxing promoter John Hyland, who is accused of blackmailing football agent Paul Stretford and once represented Wayne Rooney, has heard this week that Rooney signed away his image rights for just £2 to a "ruthless" sports agent who boasted he would "milk the cow at both ends". The allegations were made by Hyland about Stretford in a court case expected to last three weeks.
Arsenal's £100 million sponsorship deal with Emirates for shirt sponsorship and stadium naming rights on Ashburton Grove may be a British record but still pales in comparison to the naming-rights deal between the NFL's Houston Texans and Reliant Energy worth $10 million per annum until 2032.
Croke Park said this year there were no plans to sell its stadium-naming rights; the IRFU said it was too early to sell rights for Lansdowne Road.
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"I made one decision based on money in my life - when I signed with the Mets rather than go to Stanford - and I promised I'd never do it again."
Most likely you have never heard of Billy Beane and most likely you will never hear of him again. But the subject of the controversial bestseller Moneyball has thrown a cat among the pigeons of the world of sports business.
Beane is general manager of the Oakland As, a team previously only famous for the remarkable statistic of being the joint-poorest in Major League baseball with a payroll of $60 million - compared to the $183 million being paid out by the New York Yankees.
And yet from such comparative poverty a star team have risen, topping their division, winning in the process over 100 games in a single season, reaching the play-offs, punching above their proverbial weight and generally compounding all rational expectations as to what poorly financed, low-expectation teams can achieve.
Beane has become something of a cause célèbre in US sporting circles now that he has shown it is possible to take on the big boys and beat them at their own game - on a fraction of the budget.
Other poor clubs want some of the secrets to his success. So the Toronto Blue Jays hired Beane's right-hand man JP Ricciardi and those perennial underachievers the Boston Red Sox hired a 28-year-old Harvard graduate, Theo Epstein, who had no baseball experience but is an avowed student of Beane's ways, as their general manager.
At a time when Arsenal sign a British football record shirt-sponsorship deal and naming-rights deal with Emirates for £100 million while remaining unbeaten in the Premiership; when Manchester United announce record profits once again with another £ 30million in the coffers and further expansion of Old Trafford under way; and when Chelsea, second behind Arsenal, are bankrolled to the tune of £200 million by Roman Abramovich while the world's highest-paid football manager, Jose Mourinho, gets to buy superstar players like a child in a candy shop, soccer fans might be forgiven for thinking that as the rich get richer the other 17 clubs in the Premiership are so far behind they have no hope.
Well, if you're chairman of Crystal Palace or Norwich maybe you should pick up a copy of Moneyball and see if the Beane philosophy can be applied to the football world.
"The raw disparities meant that only the rich teams could afford the best players. A poor team could only afford the maimed and the inept, and was almost certain to fail. Or so argued the people who ran baseball," writes Moneyball author Michael Lewis. But it was by following in the shadow of Beane that Lewis discovered why and how it's not necessarily always so in sport.
At this point, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez and all Real fans should turn away as Lewis points out a central tenet to Beane's winning philosophy:
"All the As' marketing studies showed that the main thing fans cared about was winning. Win with nobodies and the fans showed up, and the nobodies became stars; lose with stars and the fans stayed home, and the stars became nobodies."
At the time of writing, Real Madrid lie 10th in La Liga, have lost three games out of six and, most remarkably given their line-up of galacticos, have scored the fewest goals to the start of the season in their history.
Perez's ambition of buying the fantasy is backfiring and doing so badly. How much longer will shirt sales of losers continue? How many eight-year-olds want to wear the name and number of a player who loses all the time? Not the stuff kickabouts in the park are based on.
Magnates may buy up the world's best players and hoard them in the one dressing-room like a spoilt child or, as Lewis puts it, "Goliath, dissatisfied with his size advantage, has bought David's sling", but Real are soon finding out that even without their slings the lesser clubs are able to beat them on the pitch.
The essence of Beane's credo has been to recognise that while one cannot compete with player salaries and transfer fees, the way to beat the system is by selling on the successes and replacing them with younger, lesser-known players, ones that cost a fraction of the price of their more famous colleagues.
It sounds like a page taken from Alex Ferguson's youth policy at Manchester United and in Major League baseball terms it is. Efficiency is what they call it in the States though. And while Ferguson may have hit the jackpot with the class of 92 - Giggs, Beckham, Neville and Scholes all graduating to success in the senior team - the next generation have been few and far between and Ferguson has been more reliant on the big-name signings to enable his team to compete with the other big clubs.
The signing of 18-year-old Wayne Rooney for £27 million best illustrates the point.
As for Beane, other impoverished clubs have wanted in on the act and although he wasn't for moving from the Oakland As, the Toronto Blue Jays were able to poach the As' director of player development, JP Ricciardi. And the reasons for him being hired?
"JP was the only one with a business plan and the only one who told me 'you're spending too much money'," explained the Blue Jays CEO, Paul Godfrey.
"He basically went through the line-up and said, 'These people are all replaceable by people you've never heard of.'"
And with that, $40 million was saved over the season.
Not possible, say the doubters. Unrealistic and unbelievable.
Just track the progress of Real Madrid this season and remember who won this year's European Championships.
The Davids, it seems, are taking back their slings and beating the Goliaths.
270p - High reached this week for Manchester United's share price as against 227p this time last year.
"Every game boils down to doing the things you do best, and doing them over and over again."
£650m - The estimate of Man Utd if a Glazer formal bid for the club materialises.
$671m - Estimated value of Glazer's Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
