Swansea City vs Manchester City
As football games go, this could be as one-sided as they come. Two teams who share a division but little else.
Betting odds are as poles apart as their respective incomes.
It may surprise sports betting fans to use the David and Goliath analogy but think about it.
Swansea are a club who sold their best two players this summer. In Gylfi Sigurdsson and Fernando LLorente, they lost the two talismans who kept them up last season, the former for a fee of £40 million plus.
Now their main man is someone who, like Sigurdsson before him, is enjoying a second spell at the club only because it didn’t quite work out elsewhere.
Wilfried Bony was at Swansea before being sold to Manchester City for £28 million in 2015.
When it didn’t work out for him, and in fairness the Ivory Coast international didn’t get much of a chance, he was swiftly deemed surplus to requirements, loaned out to Stoke and then sold back to the Welsh club for less than half that figure (£12 million).
Few clubs can afford to write off such an amount.
Yet, City are in a different league to most, a different financial stratosphere. For example, while other clubs have taken decades to build up a global brand in various ways, City have been able to bankroll theirs in less than a decade.
And their fans will argue, why not! They have the money and the power to become an established superpower.
They have been champions-elect in England for the past two months and have already been installed by some as favourites to win the Champions League.
The likes of Manchester United and Chelsea, currently second and third in the Premier League, have hardly been frugal but City’s starting line-up and substitutes in their 2-1 victory at Old Trafford cost a combined £560 million (compared to United’s £390 million, granted club record signing Paul Pogba was missing from the squad).
That is one reason why they are turning the Premier League title race into a procession.
Never have I seen a squad with so few weaknesses.
Whatever injuries or suspensions befall them between now and May, they have players on the bench who can come in and do an equally good job without the need for their flow to be disrupted.
After a 14th successive league win, a Premier League record, what price now a 15th?
Even in the unpredictable drama that is the Premier League, anything else in south Wales would be a major shock.
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