City circling as Diarra gets shot at the big time

Unless a lot of people have got the wrong end of a very convincing stick, Lassana Diarra will be on the way to Real Madrid when the transfer window opens in January.

It will be the fourth move of the 23-year-old’s brief career but more significantly, if the kind of transfer fees being suggested are accurate, it could be the first of several moves in the coming months to be influenced by what I am calling the ‘Manchester City effect’.

Now I must preface this by saying I think Diarra is a fine young player with bags of ability who may well prove to be a success at the Bernabeu.

But talk of £20 million plus for a young holding midfield player who only signed for his current club for a reported £5.5 million less than 12 months ago sounds to me like a very good piece of business for Tony Adams’ club.

With rumours of tight financial at Portsmouth, surely they would normally have settled for a fee of around £15 million or even a little less.

But things have changed since the Saudis arrived in the blue half of Manchester and their immense wealth is already having a bearing on transfer dealings, even ones they are not directly involved in.

Portsmouth knew that City were also sniffing around Diarra, or, at least, media reports meant they were as far as Real Madrid were concerned, and with the daunting prospect of entering into a bidding war with the oil-rich Arabs, the Spanish side would have to bid big to secure the player’s services.

Otherwise the South coast club could just bat the offer back and wait for City to come in with a more lucrative offer.

Things took a similar turn when Roman Abramovich rolled into Chelsea, with other clubs priced out of deals for the likes of Shaun Wright-Phillips and Michael Essien, while rivals such as Manchester United and Liverpool were forced to spend big to keep up.

Nobody knows exactly how rich Manchester City now are, possibly not even Sheikh Mansour himself, but it is generally accepted that they have the resources to take finances into another stratosphere.

It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, tries to keep up.