Description: Kevan Reilly and Paul Dempsey are professional journalists who have both been writing about the soccer revolution since its inception.

Soccer has never been richer. Yet the game's new fount wealth is proving more of a threat than an opportunity. As the rich clubs get richer, the rest face at best obscurity and a worst bankruptcy. Forget romance, think finance. For promotion and relegation read profit center and insolvency. It has been a big and, in many ways, necessary change. But if soccer's bubble bursts, the consequences will affect everyone.

The financial revolution now sweeping through European soccer had to happen. It has breathed new life into a sport that was bedeviled by hooliganism, a slapdash approach to safety and corruption. But as a new order takes control of the sport many claim that the world's most popular sport has leapt out of the frying pan into the fire.

Thanks largely to television there is more money in the game than ever before, but there also seem to be more clubs facing bankruptcy. Even solid sides that appear well equipped for survival can see a small elite of super-rich teams pulling away and threatening to dominate every competition in perpetuity.

Both professionals and fans claim the game's new master. know little about the sport, its romance and traditions, and it unique structure in which even the mightiest depend on the minnows. Instead these interlopers are regarded os smash-and grab merchants after a quick buck with no real concern that they may leave a sporting wasteland behind them.

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