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Sports

The Colour Of Money: Previewing Manchester City vs. Chelsea

In the first of this week’s Premier League Previews, we look to a monied match at the top of the table, and how its meaning has changed in recent years.
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Whenever Manchester City meet Chelsea in the Premier League, it is a match associated with raw resources. Chelsea were the Premier League's original nouveau riche, Manchester City were the gaudy imitators, and as is always the way with those with new money, the Chelsea nouveaux looked down on their arriviste competitors, and were looked down on in turn by everyone else. There were certainly some valid reasons for the scorn the two clubs received from the rest of English football, not least the economic consequences of their instant injection of mega funds into the top flight, namely knock-on inflation of transfer fees, wages and outgoing cash. That said, there was also some thinly veiled envy on show from those riding the highest of metaphorical horses. The fiercest critics of Chelsea and City may have felt that they had tilted the playing field unfairly, but most rival fans, loathe as they might have been to admit it, would have given an arm and a leg for their wealth.

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Were they to have met in a top-of-the-table clash back in the febrile days of the late noughties, the narrative concerning Chelsea and City would have been about money, money and more money. These days, however, the clout of Chelsea's Russian petrodollars and Man City's oil reserves has been lessened somewhat, partly by Financial Fair Play regulations and partly by the absorbent quality of the Premier League's enormous £5.14bn television deal. While that might seem like a disadvantage for the two clubs, it comes with a greater acceptance, or at least ability to ignore, the lavish expenditure which has been necessary to propel them into the upper echelons of world football. It also means that they are more likely to be judged on merit, and with fewer caveats as to their pecuniary privilege and often semi-grotesque outlay.

On merit, then, it's hard to back against Chelsea this weekend, with the league leaders going to the Etihad on the back of a seven-match winning run in the league. Much has been made of Antonio Conte's tactical reversion to his preferred 3-4-3, and the success it has brought to a team who, back in September, were completely dismantled at the Emirates while playing an ineffective flat back four. While City will probably be the toughest test of that new formation, the freedom it's brought to the likes of Victor Moses, Marcos Alonso and Eden Hazard is apparent in abundance. Meanwhile, City have played freely in fits and bursts over the past few weeks, but have ultimately scraped up a couple of wins against Crystal Palace and Burnley as well as a draw against Middlesbrough, which is hardly the emphatic response to their victory over Barcelona which Pep Guardiola will have wanted or foreseen.

Whichever of Conte and Pep manages to triumph on Saturday, the result could feasibly swing the balance of power in the title race. We might only be a third of the way through the season, but it's games like this which, at the end of the campaign, we so often look back on as being decisive. In the aftermath of last year's usurpation by Leicester, there has never been a better time to build a legacy with a Premier League behemoth, starting with what is essentially a clean slate. Win the league, and the rewards could be endless. Naturally, it all comes back to money in the end.