What is the world of Football coming to?

What were the last 10 Record Breaking moves in the Barclay’s Premier League (formerly known as the English Premier League)?

The last 10 record breaking moves in the BPL are as follows:
June 1992 – Paul Gascoigne moved from Tottenham to Lazio for £5.5 mil
Jan 1995 – Andy Cole moved from Newcastle to Manchester United for £7 mil
June 1995 – Dennis Bergkamp from Inter Milan to Arsenal for £7.5 mil
June 1995 – Stan Collymore from Notts Forest to Liverpool for £8.5 mil
July 1996 – Alan Shearer from Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle for £15 mil
Aug 1999 – Nicolas Anelka from Arsenal to Real Mardrid for £22.5 mil
July 2001 – Juan Veron from Lazio to Manchester United for £28.1 mil
July 2002 – Rio Ferdinand from Leeds to Manchester United for £29.1 mil
July 2006 – Andriy Shevchenko from AC Milan to Chelsea for £30.8 mil
Sept 2008 – Robinho from Real Madrid to Manchester City for £32.5 mil

If you take a close look at the spender, you can see that Manchester United broke the record 3 times. In fact, they nearly broke it again with an around £30 mil transfer for Berbetov in September 2008 only for Robinho’s stunning transfer topping their bid. What do the last 10 changes tell us?

The face of soccer is changing as the increase in transfer records grew exponentially. Within a period of 15 years, the record has risen around 6 times. At this rate of growth, a player will cost £180 mil in another 15 years time. What kind of crazy club will pay that atrocious sum of money for one single player? If this superstar player gets injured in an International game, will his country pay the club for his injury? Or worse still, God forbid, some ‘wise’ club manager decides to invest in a £10,000 player and the mission is for this guy to take out the superstar by hook or by crook. What will happen to soccer in general?

Scanning through the list, one can also see that only a few of them justified their price tags. In my humble opinion, the best from the lot would be the brilliant capture of the non-flying Dutchman Dennis Bergkamp by Arsenal. At least Bruce Rioch did something right before leaving Arsenal! For only £7.5 mil, we had a great bargain as Bergkamp finished his career with Arsenal, appearing 315 times, scoring 87 times and providing numerous assists in his 11 years here. The worst? It would be a tough call between Stan Collymore, Juan Veron and Andriy Shevchenko. Well, at least Stan the Man did score a few stunning goals (barely a few). So I am going to give my condemning vote to Shevchenko. At his price, I think one can buy a few John Carew or Zaki and they probably score 3 times more goals than him.

What does all this tell us? Money can’t buy you the best soccer players and money is getting smaller in value by the day. In this time and age of global financial crisis, it is about time that someone stepped in to regulate soccer players’ wages and the clubs’ finances.