The week that changed the face of City – and the game

When Paul Scally, the Gillingham chairman, said he was moving to Dubai earlier this year to seek new investment for the League Two club his explanation was met with derision. While a sheikh has yet to be found to lift the Gills out of penury it could be Scally was ahead of the game after all.

Few weeks have underlined English football's global appeal, and the impact this has on the game's traditional working practices, as much as this one. During the course of five crazy days it became apparent that the key decisions at Manchester City will be taken in the Middle East, West Ham are run from Iceland, and player recruitment at Newcastle is decided in London, which might as well be a foreign country as far as most Geordies are concerned.

Non-domestic owners are not a new development: Mohamed Al Fayed bought Fulham in 1997. He, though, was based in Britain and with a few exceptions has largely let his managers manage. Roman Abramovich has foisted a few players on his managers at Chelsea, and Liverpool's American owners have not been as generous as Rafael Benitez would like, but neither practice is unheard of and those clubs have generally been run in the customary manner.

This week's events suggest a seismic shift in emphasis. City's new owners were in such a hurry to make a marquee signing they appear to have flipped through the pages of World Soccer, saying, "Him, or him, and how about him? Why not all of them?" Quite how Mark Hughes would have fitted Robinho, who was signed, Dimitar Berbatov, Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Cristiano Ronaldo and Fernando Torres, who were inquired about, and the summer acquisitions Jo and Shaun Wright-Phillips into his front line one cannot imagine. Perhaps we will find out when the transfer window reopens.

At least Hughes' problem is an owner who wants to buy everyone. Both Alan Curbishley and Kevin Keegan claim to have been faced with owners intent on slashing the wage bill and replacing players they trusted with foreign ones they knew little of.

The rise of the director of football, sporting director, call him what you will – and you can be sure Dennis Wise has been called a few things in the Strawberry pub outside St James' Park these last few days – has changed the landscape. If the club signs the players a manager's role is diminished to that of a coach. There is some logic to it. When a team is struggling it is easier to dispense with one manager than 11 footballers, so the manager gets fired. Yet his replacement invariably wants to bring in his own players, while having little time for some of his predecessor's. Clubs with a high turnover of managers thus end up with huge squads, full of overpaid, underused players. Witness Manchester City in the mid-Nineties.

If a manager is any good, so the hypothesis goes, he should be able to motivate and deploy tactically any group of decent players.

So much for the theory. The most successful English clubs of the last 40 years, Alex Ferguson's Manchester United, Arsène Wenger's Arsenal, Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest, the Liverpool of Bill Shankly and Bill Paisley, Don Revie's Leeds, have all had a dominant figurehead. Clubs where the chain of command is blurred – Spurs since the arrival of Damien Comolli, Blackburn after Kenny Dalglish moved "upstairs", even, it could be argued given the resources, Abramovich's Chelsea – have underachieved.

Will Newcastle and West Ham prove exceptions? Given how relatively cheap foreign players are there is an argument for employing someone in a recruitment capacity with knowledge of the market. However, at present Wise and his ilk have power without responsibility. That way lies chaos.

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