Football's appeal has always been largely based in it's sincerity. Being a 'true' supporter who stuck by a club regardless of who played for it, how they did, who managed it and any number of reasons that cause fans of other sports to lose interest. We demand that players conduct themselves with honour, and our clubs build natural success through the strength of its fanbase and chairmen and boardmembers who look out for the best interests of the club.

But with Liverpool joining Aston Villa, Portsmouth, West Ham, Manchester United and of course Chelsea as being placed firmly in the hands of foreign businessmen (operative word being "business") the Premiership is changing quickly. Before long, even those clubs who have carved out a niche for themselves on limited budgets (Bolton, Curbishley's Charlton) will be firmly swept aside as the more popular clubs are bought out and given cash injections. Even the likes of Tottenham, traditionally a big spender beyond its success on the pitch, are in serious danger of falling behind as clubs below them start matching their spend levels.

This time next season, we could well see as many as half of the Premiership clubs enjoying foreign money and suddenly a massive part of the natural appeal of football will be dead. If your club isn't part of that "lucky" group, you may as well pack it in.

Scouting is easy.

Chelsea may have paid Tottenham a couple million pounds for Frank Arnesen and his scouting network but they were paying for his connections, not his eye for talent. A quick browse through the players he brought to Tottenham (Emil Halfredsson, Spase Dilevski, Rodrigo Defendi, David Limbersky et al) showed that the world's premiere Chief Scout got a hell of a lot more wrong than he got right. In fact, if I compare the real life careers of all the youngsters I unearthed in Football Manager 2006 in the last year alone to those that Arnesen has - the evidence clearly shows that Abramovich should be handing me a few hundred thousand quid a year instead. The World Club Championship, chock full of relatively unknown players, represented a perfect opportunity to hone my skills further.

So as Auckland FC and Al Ahly kicked off I was sure that a few players would catch my eye, and a couple quick emails to Premiership clubs would signal the beginning of a new career as a football scout. But after 20 odd minutes I realised the one thing that every talent spotter must be capable of, that I was clearly not - enduring terrible, terrible football matches in search of new talent. Auckland FC were full of industry and effort, Al Ahly were high on technical skill but the match remained somewhat amateurish. Passes flew miles out of bounds by accident, players fell comically and the referee seemed a bit confused.

I'm committed to sticking to the task of finding some true talent that has to exist when you pit the best clubs from each confederation against each other. But in 94 grueling minutes I learned exactly why Frank Arnesen's job is not quite as fun as, say, Steve McClaren's. Popping over to watch FH Hafnarfjordur in order to scout Halfredsson or Viktoria Plzen to get a final view on Limbersky is almost not worth whatever Roman is paying him.

Almost.