The recent deal struck for Frank Lampard and the proposed new contract for Michael Owen is for me the tipping point, I have always been against salary capping but the sums now being offered to little above average or injury prone players is just ridiculous. Alan Sugar once said that, “Money goes through a club like a laxative and straight into the players’ pockets”. it was one of the best ways to sum up the state of football today. If you are Chelsea it does not matter, if you are Man U you keep up the pretence of being able to afford it, and if you are the rest you make do with other top teams cast-offs. Or like Arsenal you “grow your own”.

If you capped salaries and transfer fees to an agreed FIFA & UEFA level it would help other teams to compete and surely with image rights the top players can still earn their fortunes.

However events over the past few months have for me thrown up even more concern as to where the money is coming from and how close current politics are to our Premier League.

You may think Russia’s invasion of Georgia is a bit too tenuous to have much of a link with our Premier League but stay with me. If, as the West has been stupidly encouraging, Georgia does join NATO (this is equivalent in goading terms of Mexico joining the old Soviet Bloc) our country would become duty bound to come to her aid should Mr. Putin decide to make a regime change again in any number of Russia’s former satellite states.

Russia’s new found confidence is based on its natural resources of oil and gas, Abramovich owns oil company Sibneft... and guess who runs the largest gas company in Russia (Gazprom)... Mr. Usmanov, who in case you have forgotten owns over a quarter of our club.

Both Abramovich and Usmanov are good friends with Putin, they have to be because Putin would have no qualms in taking away the sources of wealth from these later day ‘Klondikers’. In my opinion it is not a matter of Abramovich and Usmanov jumping when Putin demands it is quite simply how high!

Putin runs Russia. We could have the scenario where some of the major companies that fund the Russia war machine are owner and part owners of some of our top football clubs. To keep the world’s most wealthy away from our clubs, wage capping may be the answer, if it reduced the advantage of money in football it would be a start. Then make every club a limited company - that way there is at least some traceability of capital when it is introduced into a club.

Surely nobody is surprised by the farcical events at Man City. What do you expect when the yardstick for deciding who is “fit & proper” to run a football club was thrown away years ago when greed finally took hold of our national game? We are going to have empty stadiums if the cost of watching football at grounds is not reduced, even season ticket holders will miss out on games simply because of the cost of getting to the ground and the subsistence costs when they become too prohibitive.

The pooling of players as happens in American Football would also help players who are on the fringes of first team football, Shaun Wright-Phillips at Chelsea will probably start less than a dozen games for them yet if he were at Portsmouth, who would like to sign him, he would start every game. But because Chelsea paid a nation’s national debt for him he stays at a club because of his grossly over-inflated price tag (Chelsea have the same problem with Shevchenko).

Take some of the advantage of money away from football clubs and we may see a fairer league with players playing for clubs because they like their style of football or because they grew up in the area. Pipe dreams? Probably, but unless the world footballing bodies, the FA and the PFA get together quickly that “golden goose” is going expire and we are going to see dozens of clubs going out of business.

For those who think that my connection with football, the Russian Oligarchs and Georgia are ridiculous, just wait till Russia starts to restrict the supply of these precious commodities and then see on which side Mr. Usmanov and Roman stand. OK, in business, conflicts of interest occur all the time and our country does not care where the money comes from as long as it is stuffed through the City’s financial institutes and comes out the other side legit.

The future will still see the big clubs able to raise more money through their sheer size and branding power but if a mid-table club can find the same money and salary for a player as a top club, due to capping, surely a more competitive league will evolve and then perhaps football clubs will stop charging ‘criminal’ prices for basic items like food, drink and the statutory replica shirt which very soon will cost nearer £100, in a reckless and useless pursuit of parity with the top teams.

Arsenal need Arsene Wenger to weave his magic for a few more years and we will then be able to generate enough funds to really start to compete with the big two, with or without capping but with a worldwide salary structure in place and Arsene’s economic nous, coupled with his continuous player production line, a regulated transfer and salary system would give us a huge advantage over the buy-to-win philosophy of Chelsea and the Mancs.