Manchester City, the perennial gloom-sunk underachievers for whom the former midfielder Paul Lake's recent autobiography, a tale of injury, broken dreams and depression, is their chronicle of the late 1980s and 1990s, still feel like an unlikely recipient of such investment. Mansour, with a further £300m paid into City in 2010-11, has now spent £800m, permanently, on City, their fans still singing: "We're not really here," and not quite believing it is definitely real.

Those who feel or argue that this is not what football should be about, apart from the more rational analysis about how far players' wages are being inflated or whether City will comply with Uefa's financial fair play rules, are historically correct, of course. The Premier League, centrally, blandly repeats that they are "ownership neutral", meaning they have no view about what form of ownership is decent and which is wrong, which creates an impression that they are dazzled and paralysed by the serial overseas takeovers for which they never planned. They attempt to argue it was ever thus, rich men pouring money into clubs, but it never was, not on this scale.

Club owners such as the Moores family at Liverpool and Everton did finance their clubs to some extent, and owner-directors did lower down, but money was not poured in to sign players and bankroll outsized wage bills. For much of football's history there was a modest maximum players' wage, which rendered that unnecessary. At City and United, Peter Swales and the Edwards family, respectively, did not put money in over decades in charge, and they ultimately profited personally from their ownership of the clubs.

Jack Walker, in the Premier League breakaway era, was the first to win a championship by pouring fortunes into Blackburn Rovers from his own coffers, and the millions it took and the £10,000 weekly wage paid to the striker Chris Sutton, which shocked football, look quaintly local now, in this generation of international plutocrat owners. Roman Abramovich, flush from the cut-price auction from which he extracted ownership of formerly state-owned Russian oil assets, has since spent around £750m on trying to claim silverware at Chelsea.

But £800m spent in three years, since City finished ninth and hurtled towards financial collapse under Thaksin Shinawatra, the fugitive former prime minister of Thailand, is unprecedented. Almost all of it has gone on buying players and paying their up to £160,000-a-week basic wages, because City's stadium was already built; the venue for the 2002 Commonwealth Games was converted for football afterwards, with lottery and public money, by Sport England (who spent £78m) and Manchester city council (£49m). Mansour's investment has paid for a fan-friendlier sprucing-up of the stadium, improvements to the Carrington training ground and a new staff office block, but the overwhelming bulk of the £800m has been spent on players and their wages.

Those scoffing that it could not work, that the players' egos would not gel, have been quietened this season, most resoundingly by the 6-1 defeat of United, whose owners, the Glazers, have given not one cent to United and drained out almost £600m. Complaints from clubs such as Arsenal, owned by a billionaire American, Stan Kroenke, who intends to put nothing into the club and has endorsed the Glazers' leveraged practices, can ring hollow. Arsenal themselves benefit from the accident of geography, a 60,000-seat stadium they were able to finance largely due to London property prices, which turned Highbury into a windfall, and a south-east fanbase that has just about stood for paying some of the world's highest ticket prices.

In English football, the big clubs rose to the top because they made more money from their bigger grounds, but there was more sharing of income and the rewards from television were nowhere near as huge. Now there is no level playing field in the "self-sustaining model" Arsenal preach or the break-even of Uefa's financial fair play.

To take a club up towards success now cannot be done with a crazy gang of players or a manager of alchemic genius such as Brian Clough. It takes one of the world's richest men, and £800m, as Manchester City announced on Friday.{jcomments on}

The Guardian