Graphic: Football's crazy fortnight

When the guys at Sky came out of the pre-season fixtures meeting this summer, they must have been feeling pretty good about Saturday, September 13. Liverpool versus Manchester United, one of the traditional highlights, exclusively live at 12.45pm. Always a talking point, always hammer and tongs, this time with the added ingredient of pitting the team tipped to make Liverpool’s most sustained title challenge in years against the Barclays Premier League champions.

Remember last season, when Javier Mascherano was sent off and it got a bit lively in the studio between Andy Gray and Jamie Redknapp? Should be another cracker today. And what did those poor saps at Setanta have by way of competition? Manchester City against Chelsea early evening. Not a complete ratings bust, but, let’s face it, very much the poorly made sequel to the morning blockbuster. A no-nonsense three points for Chelsea, the audience asleep on the sofa by half-time. Mildly diverting until the first goal by Deco, but nothing that is going to stop anyone getting the dinner on.

Funny how things work out, isn’t it?

Chelsea’s trip north is the pick of it, but the negotiators could have deputised Little Jack Horner to select the live action for today, randomly putting in his thumb and pulling out a plum from what must constitute the most remarkable set of matches in the modern era; a watershed in domestic football, in fact.

The last to kick off — City versus Chelsea — represents the changing face of the English game, a collision of spending power and potential unlike any club fixture in the world. Yet even so, the headlines could come from anywhere. From the North East, where the soured dreams of a city will be on display in all its spleen-venting fury at Newcastle United, to the North West, where the new teenaged hero of English football, Theo Walcott, travels with Arsenal, three days after revitalising the national team with a hat-trick against Croatia in Zagreb. Tellingly, he may not even get a game.

There is a new manager in the stands as West Ham United visit West Bromwich Albion, a first foreigner coaching at a club once inseparable from the fabric and history of English football. And then there is Liverpool versus United, thunder stolen, perhaps, but no less compelling; a hearty classic on a menu of nouvelle cuisine.

Of the eight matches to be played today, at least five say something about the evolution of football in England: the changes, the amazing acceleration of wealth and ambition. And in a league that is increasingly surrendering its connection to Saturday afternoon as the highlight of the sporting weekend, this is rare indeed.

The reason so many can glibly profess to have no interest in the international game is because of the daily extravaganza that is the Premier League. It is often compared to a soap opera, but that would be wrong. Not a British soap, anyway. This is not a grim trudge through London’s Docklands or the cobbled streets of Salford. If the Premier League is a serial, it is Dynasty or Dallas, a world of private jets, glamour and duplicity; even oil, now that Abu Dhabi has joined the party.

Today’s matches play out familiar themes — a lust for glory, money, success. There are bitter feuds, moments of hope. Maybe one day we will wake up and it will be a dream, like Bobby Ewing’s death. Maybe the 2008-09 season will be like the 1985-86 run of Dallas — one long fantasy sequence in which clubs pass between the billionaires of the East and the owner of Newcastle takes his counsel not from Tyneside’s most beloved son, Kevin Keegan, but a Chelsea season ticket-holder and property developer from Brixton called Tony Jimenez.

It would have been unthinkable even six weeks ago that Chelsea’s visit to Manchester City could usurp Liverpool v United as the most intriguing game of the day, but that is how fast the competition moves these days. Perhaps it will sink in when Robinho appears in his pale blue shirt beneath the rueful eye of Luiz Felipe Scolari, who thought that he had joined the richest club in the world until the name Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan appeared on the ticker along the bottom of his television screen. Today is the first of the new for English football because an elite four is about to become an elite five.

Old sweats will say that money cannot buy success, but that is misguided optimism. Money can buy success and in most cases it does. It cannot guarantee it, as Chelsea found with the purchase of Andriy Shevchenko, but used wisely it is a better bet even than having a genius at the helm. Ask Arsène Wenger, whose beautiful players with their fantasy football are, like Liverpool and United, on today’s undercard.