Football Food For Thought / Ralph Ellis / 16 January 2009 /

Ralph Ellis is a man who knows a thing or two when it comes to sorting the wheat from the chaff as regards press speculation over football transfers. Which is why he's worth listening to when it comes to predicting whether Kaka will become a Manchester City player.

In the front half of the papers there's the real world - but when sport starts the credit crunch stops. And by the time you get to the back it's hard to believe the world economy has got any sort of problem at all.

There's £12million for Craig Bellamy from Tottenham; there's £14million for Kenwyne Jones; and most of all there's £108million for Kaka. The only issue is whether it gets paid now or gets paid in the summer because Manchester City's mega rich owners are determined to make it happen, and happen it will.

The timing, of course, is pretty damn important to Betfair punters. The Specials bet on offer is whether the Brazilian will start Manchester City's match with Middlesbrough on February 7, the first available game after the transfer window. Yesterday morning it was a [3.9] shot. By today it's down to roughly even money.

The problem is in trying to cut through all the guesswork and speculative stories to work out who knows what. The Daily Express's Manchester reporter Richard Tanner believes Kaka is planning to tell City he won't join them until the summer when he's seen how well the rest of their season has progressed. The Daily Star's David Woods, who has good links to super agent Pini Zahavi who tends to be involved somewhere in most of these mega deals, says the same thing.

And yet common sense tells you that when that weight of money is being thrown at a dea,l it is bound to happen. AC Milan have clearly decided that, however much they want to keep the Brazilian who has just been named by FIFA as the fifth best player in the world, a transfer fee in excess of £100million is just too much to turn down. They have given Kaka permission to talk to City and he'll fly over - inevitably in a private jet - next week to look around Eastlands, meet Mark Hughes, and decide what happens next.

The Mail, whose contacts to City are close, say by then Hughes will have already added Holland holding midfielder Nigel de Jong to their squad after persuading Hamburg to take £15million for him.

Perhaps the best analysis of the reasons behind City's mega money move comes from The Express's chief sports writer John Dillon. He calls it a deal with ten noughts on and explains "by the way I'm counting eight for the £100million plus two more pence after the decimal point for effect. Which, after all, is what this proposed deal is about. In Abu Dhabi, source of City's endless money, there is a hotel with a dome larger than St Paul's Cathedral, covered on the inside with 22 carat gold leaf. They don't run it to make money, it is a symbol of wealth and power."

The idea of the Kaka deal, says Dillon, is that if they get Kaka to Manchester then every other player they want will follow. He is the symbol of the club's ambition to be a world power. The man who makes you know they aren't playing at it. It goes back to when Dimitar Berbatov opted to sign down the road at Old Trafford last summer, even though City had tabled a bigger bid than their neighbours and put more cash for wages on the table. Berbatov wanted the place where he thought he'd win more trophies. As Dillon says: "It may have been different if Kaka had been waiting there, juggling a ball along Rowsley Street to lure him in."

It's a cogent argument, and makes you realise why there is no limit to the determination of City's new owners to get their man. In those circumstances backing it to happen at anywhere better than [1.9] has to be a good value bet.

Five things you might not know about Kaka

1.The Milan players know him as Ricky, because his full name is Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite. That should pull in a few bob more than just Kaka in the Manchester City shop at 75p a letter on the back of a shirt!

2.He got his nickname because younger brother Rodrigo, now also a professional footballer, couldn't pronounce Ricardo properly when he was little and called him caca.

3.At the age of 18 he fractured his spine in a swimming pool accident and it was feared he could be paralysed for life. He has been a devout Christian since making a full recovery.

4.AC Milan owner Silvio Berlusconi described the £5million fee he paid Sao Paulo to sign Kaka in 2003 as "peanuts".

5.He was in Brazil's 2002 world cup winning squad, but didn't get on the pitch as a last minute substitute because the ref didn't see Luiz Felipe Scolari's signal that he wanted to send him on.

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