Roberto de Assis Moreira, agent and brother of Ronaldinho, was back in Spain yesterday, having been royally entertained at the City of Manchester Stadium on Saturday. He spent time with Pini Zahavi, the match-maker, and met representatives of Thaksin Shinawatra, the Manchester City owner, who was detained in Thailand preparing for a trial on corruption charges.

It has been reported that City are prepared to offer Ronaldinho wages of more than £100,000 a week and that Assis will put these terms to his sibling, who has had a disappointing season at Barcelona and is widely expected to move in the summer. In all probability, their conversation will conclude sharply around the time Ronaldinho is introduced to the concept of the Intertoto Cup, which City plan to enter. Having appeared jaded at the prospect of even the most glittering prizes, Ronaldinho is unlikely to have his appetite reawakened by the thought of taking part in a competition rated so highly around Europe that it will be abolished in 2009.

A contrivance to allow the pools companies to continue making money through the summer and featuring teams who failed to qualify for European competition by conventional means, the Intertoto Cup was conceived with the slogan “the cup for the cupless”. Hope for the hopeless would be more appropriate, which is why each year this shipwrecked tournament becomes an attraction for those clubs who once had loftier ambitions. City are perfect Intertoto Cup fodder. Ronaldinho is not.

Anyway, it does not matter. Ronaldinho will get better offers, financially and professionally, and even if he does not, when push comes to bank-breaking shove, something would happen to scupper the deal at City’s end. It would have to because to judge from his previous statement, Thaksin can no more afford to keep Ronaldinho in the manner to which he is accustomed than English football can continue living beyond its means with the credit crunch coming.

A surer indication of the state of play at City is Thaksin’s description of his first year at the helm. “Heavy on the pockets,” he called it, having spent £56 million on a shiny new team for Sven-Göran Eriksson. In a recession, first to go are the luxuries and there is no disposable item likely to make a bigger dent in an overstretched wallet than a mid-table Barclays Premier League club with ambitions to be something more; particularly if, like Joe Lewis at Tottenham Hotspur, you have just tipped £500 million into a black hole known as Bear Stearns, the failed investment bank.

The cost involved in battling it out with Liverpool for a fourth place that will far from guarantee Champions League football once the alleged reforms of Michel Platini, the Uefa president, kick in must seem like a real overindulgence in the present climate. That is why City, and others, continue to broadcast mixed messages.

Thaksin knows that to take the next step requires greater investment even than was made last year. He will also be aware that this capital outlay secures nothing by way of return and could, in a precarious market, be his undoing. So, in one breath he states that there will not be huge sums of transfer money available this summer, while in another room Ronaldinho’s brother is the guest of honour.

In many cases, the illusion of ambition is what is being placed before supporters. The real job expansion market concerns the role of director of football, super-scouts whose task it is to spot the next Cristiano Ronaldo and do so early, when he can be bought for relative peanuts, a nice house for his parents and the promise of a trial for his younger brother. Even Roman Abramovich, having spent pushing £300 million on a team who are often no more than efficient (and not always that) is looking to Chelsea’s youth team, who contest the second leg of the FA Youth Cup final with Manchester City a week tomorrow.

West Ham United have become a classic example of the change in thinking. When Björgólfur Gudmundsson, the 799th richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine, took over in November 2006, his consortium, fronted by the excitable Eggert Magnússon, quickly established a reputation for spending money like it was going out of fashion, which it is. Alan Curbishley arrived in the manager’s seat and wages went skywards. Fredrik Ljungberg, who will be 31 next week, is paid substantially more than he was in his prime at Arsenal; Liverpool were beaten to the signature of Lucas Neill. Even as recently as last September, Gudmundsson was talking in terms of Champions League football and winning the Premier League.

Since then there has been a downscaling. Magnússon has departed and Scott Duxbury, the chief executive, recently revealed that there would be no significant signings in the summer. He said that the squad — which has planted roots in mid-table mediocrity this season as securely as a 300-year-old oak tree — is capable of having a crack at the top six (translation: scraping into the Uefa Cup) as it is. The new blueprint is to get a collection of injury-blighted players back to fitness while looking to Freddie Sears, a promising 18-year-old from Hornchurch, Essex. The established Champions League elite are not known to be quivering in their boots at the prospect of this assault.

The one development at Upton Park in recent months has been the appointment of a technical director, Gianluca Nani, who will have some influence on transfer policy. West Ham’s shortcomings under Curbishley have been specific, but also ring a universal chord. The bottom-line problem is that the manager appears to have picked his targets using a five-year-old Rothmans Football Yearbook, giving West Ham a squad of players who are definitely title contenders if they can only find a way of turning the clock back to 2003.

On the day Nani was appointed, the reckoning behind the decision became apparent. “I need to have my eyes opened up,” Curbishley, who has also pondered lately why he is not more popular with supporters and may just have answered his own question, said. “We’ve seen young players going to other clubs and everyone’s scratched their heads and asked, ‘Why has that happened?’ ”

So Nani’s arrival, while on the surface representing progress and investment, is also a cost-cutting exercise. Gudmundsson is tired of paying over the odds for average Premier League players and wants some of the cut-price action that Arsène Wenger gets for Arsenal. He is hoping that Nani will save him money by spotting talent before it has played 300 games and won 50 caps. Those guys do not come cheap.

It is a familiar story. Owners who arrived promising instant fixes have quickly been converted to long-term strategists by the operating costs of turning fourteenth place into fourth and an economic downturn that is leaving even the strongest vulnerable. With the American economy in crisis, heavily mortgaged big clubs such as Manchester United and Liverpool cannot feel comfortable, either. Borrowings may have been secured at fixed rates, but like any loan, the deal will expire and then problems will occur.

Does this mean that the balance of power will change? Not necessarily. Once established, maintaining a place in the elite group is not half as expensive as getting there and the only way the dominant quartet of Premier League clubs can be threatened is if a financial squeeze coincides with other factors, such as the loss of key players or a talented manager and motivator such as Wenger or Sir Alex Ferguson.

United without Ferguson, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes and unable to operate substantially in the transfer market may dip, but it would have to be a spectacularly dramatic fall for their place to be taken by Tottenham Hotspur, even with a head coach as able as Juande Ramos in charge. Ramos appears to be in need of half a team to move on at Tottenham and he is not alone.

Despite the solid stewardship of Randy Lerner, the owner, and Martin O’Neill, the manager, Aston Villa have found the next stage of their evolution devilishly hard to accomplish. Portsmouth have thrived since the arrival of Alexandre Gaydamak, but it was noticeable that when rumours started to circulate about the future of Harry Redknapp, the manager, they were soon accompanied by talk that the owner was willing to sell. Scratch the surface and so much of this new money has instability beneath.

Thaksin is not faking his tango with Ronaldinho, but times are tough, getting tougher and it is going to take more than one Brazilian superstar who may have passed his peak to elevate City beyond the ordinary. Since 2003-04, when Arsenal went the season unbeaten, Chelsea and Manchester United have spent £253.33 million combined to muscle ahead of them. Liverpool have spent £100.57 million and are yet to manage it in the league. And these teams have been financed by the benefits of regular participation in the Champions League. Thaksin has to find the solution in his own pockets, via the Intertoto Cup, during a global recession. Ronaldinho may be spared the delights of Ancoats in midwinter after all.

- Martin Samuel was named Sports Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in London last night. The honour comes less than a month after the Chief Football Correspondent of The Times was named Sports Writer of the Year by the Sports Journalists’ Association for the third successive year. In the Sports Photographer of the Year category, Marc Aspland was highly commended.