Soccer: Top four losing like never before

The question we all dread from foreign visitors is: "What does Britain actually do?"

All we can say is that we surge into cities on overcrowded trains and then disperse mysteriously, pointlessly invade far-off countries and talk an awful lot about the Premier League.

England's highest soccer tier has been one of Britain's few authentic economic miracles, even if it is the perfect expression of a debt-fuelled and unequal society.

It's Upstairs Downstairs with naming rights. One missing virtue in the 21st century was competitive balance, until the credit boom went pop and recession looked like the best thing to happen to the game since the Taylor Report.

At the halfway point this has been the most captivating Premier League season in memory. The aristocracy are losing games like never before, the middle classes (Aston Villa, Tottenham Hotspur) are on the march and the proletariat (Burnley) are restoring the lost virtues of thrift and self-reliance.

This week I nearly banged my television set to restore reception when the Burnley CEO said how much his club hated the thought of going overdrawn.

Superficially, not much has changed. On Boxing Day morning the top four were the old rich gang minus Liverpool, who are caught in their old private maelstrom. Beyond Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal, you could still get 50-1 on Villa or Spurs winning the title.

Yet there is a sense at last that the big powers are no longer rattling their jewellery. The reason, surely, is that, unlike in society, the downturn weakened the rich more than the poor.

In a year when the British economy was shown to be a con trick perpetrated by the banks and their gimps in Government, the big clubs stopped spending on the scale they had when leveraged loans could be had like Smarties.

Manchester United, who paid £263 million ($594 million) in interest in the three years to 2008, banked 75 per cent of the £80 million they received for Cristiano Ronaldo.

Arsenal trousered most of the £30 million they took for Kolo Toure and Emmanuel Adebayor as City chased their dream of building "a successful business where the core competency is football".

Liverpool groan under borrowings of £313 million, and threw away £36.5 million in interest charges.

Best of all, in August, the Uefa president, Michel Platini, received a visit from a Russian man dismayed by Manchester City's trend-defying largesse.

"Roman Abramovich is a football person and passionate about the game. He loves football," Platini reported. "He has come to me and said we must do something about this."

Abramovich's new religion was that clubs should spend only what they earn. The tom-toms say Chelsea may return to the old extravagance to buy a striker next month, but only to head off the transfer ban their lawyers managed to get suspended.

The result of these corrosions of power is that the traditional top four had lost 19 games by Christmas Day. United went down 3-0 at Fulham and have lost at Burnley and at home to Villa.

With seven defeats, Liverpool were the Christmas puddings, and Chelsea and Arsenal had lost three and four games each.

For there to be a proper shift, the weak needed to get stronger, too, and the vulnerability of the heavyweights has encouraged a less pusillanimous tactical approach from the smaller clubs. Wolves took a custard pie for sacrificing the reserves at Old Trafford partly because Mick McCarthy's caution was out of synch with the new iconoclastic mood.

Villa, Spurs, Birmingham, Fulham, Sunderland and Stoke are exceptionally well managed, which helps, but a stronger bourgeoisie is not the only encouraging feature of this unpredictable campaign. For the first time in years, the eye is being drawn to B-list players who have outshone some of the old cast of household names.

Villa's James Milner scoops the halfway prize for most improved player, and Stephen Warnock is now a better bet than Wayne Bridge at left-back for England. Carlos Cuellar is another Villa Park standout. Across town, unlovable Lee Bowyer is propelling Birmingham's revival. Bolton's Gary Cahill is coveted by bigger clubs searching for new centre-halves - the problem position, increasingly, in a game of ever-increasing pace.

Fulham's Bobby Zamora is another refreshing perseverance tale. There seems greater richness and diversity across endeavour's scale.

Kleptomania survives in the banking sector, but in the Premier League, recklessness is being punished. Those crazy-wage payers, Portsmouth and West Ham, confront the consequences of their folly. But elsewhere the crash has bred new life out of the dead ground of inequality.

- OBSERVER