Football is in the mainstream news again, and this time it has nothing to do with John Terry or Ashley and Cheryl Cole.

First off, the latest rankings of the world’s richest football clubs are out. Secondly, it seems Manchester United may be changing owners, with Man U fan, not to mention Goldman Sachs guru, Jim O’Neill apparently orchestrating the buyout.

But this story has ramifications beyond football.

Manchester United is now merely the third richest football club in the world, behind both Real Madrid and Barcelona. The Madrid team is now worth 401 million euros, with Man U, which, not so long ago, was the world’s number one, worth a paltry 327 million euros. Bayern Munich is number four on the rich list, and Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool take fifth, sixth and seventh spot respectively. They are followed by three Italian clubs, Juventus, Inter and AC Milan. The combined value of the big four British clubs is worth just over 1 billion euros, compared to around three quarters of a billion for the two Spanish clubs.

This year has seen the British Premiership become more open, with a number of clubs threatening the dominance of the big four. This may mean that in years to come the likes of Tottenham, Aston Villa and Manchester City will join the top ten wealthiest clubs, or it may simply mean that the combined wealth of the Premiership won’t grow, just become more widely dispersed.

If football was solely about money, it seems likely that a European super league would have evolved by now, made up of the world’s 20 or so richest clubs.

But football is not just about money.

Jim O’Neill knows a thing or two about money. He is the chief economist at Goldman Sachs and is the man who coined the acronym BRIC to describe Brazil, India, Russia and China. And he is a Manchester United supporter.

The club’s current owners, the Glazer family, come very much in the mould of private equity. Their purchase of the club came in the form of massive borrowing, meaning the club has to make profits just so they can repay their debts.

The former German Vice-Chancellor Franz Müntefering once described private equity as a “swarm of locusts”. No doubt many Man U fans would put the Glazers in the same category.

After Malcolm Glazer bought the US football team Tampa Bay Buccaneers, back in the 1990s, they enjoyed considerable sporting success, but not all the fans were happy, especially when the Glazers tried to move the club’s ground out of town.

But the truth is, during the mid noughties, leveraged buy outs were the fashion. Now they are out. This may well be a good thing. Private equity purchases were getting silly, and future company profits were being used to fund their purchase. This in turn risked strangling companies of the investment they required.

The shenanigans at Man Utd are a sign of this.

Now talk is that Mr O’Neill is trying to get a team of City bigwigs together to wrest control of the club from the Glazers.

It reminds one of Bob Geldof putting Live Aid together. Maybe only Bob could have done it. Maybe only Jim can put the package together that Manchester United fans deserve.

Before we leave the subject of football, it does seem there are massive parallels between footballers’ wages and bankers’ bonuses. The markets have determined that certain men, who are blessed with remarkably well coordinated feet, should earn huge sums of money. But many clubs find they can’t foot their wage bill, so head for bankruptcy. If the markets were left to their own, we would end up with just a handful of professional football clubs.

But that in turn would probably lead to the demise of football. All but the best of burgeoning football players would be starved of opportunity. But sometimes talent does not manifest itself until after a player has established himself. As a result, we would eventually see less talent and less skill.

On the other hand, the Internet could change all that. All of a sudden, the Internet provides the little clubs with an opportunity to reach out to bigger audiences.

The Internet’s enemies are the large media companies which control football broadcasting. And they just happen to be the same companies that are ganging up against Google.