In December, FIFA’s tournament to decide the best club team in the world was won by Brazil’s Sao Paulo with a 1-0 victory over English side Liverpool. Tournament games are one way of deciding who’s best, but there is another one – a global league table that, like the FIFA championship, comes around once a year. Here are the world’s top five clubs for 2005:

1. Real Madrid (Spain) 328.19
2. Manchester United (England) 293.31
3. AC Milan (Italy) 278.55
4. Juventus (Italy) 273.08
5. Chelsea 262.84

These standings have nothing to do with wins and losses on the playing field. The column of figures represents income, in millions of dollars, and the table is compiled by a firm of accountants, Deloitte & Touche.

Rounding out the top 10 of this money league are Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Inter-Milan, and Arsenal. These are the sport’s fat cats, the richest of the rich – and every one of them is European. No sign of Sao Paulo here. The Brazilians may have triumphed on the field, but loser Liverpool may well regard its eighth place in the money league – and its $215.7 million income – as a more important triumph.

Money more important than winning? Surely the one goes with the other – the more you win, the more you make? Not quite, it seems. Real Madrid gives the lie to that conventional notion. During the past three seasons, the Spanish club has won nothing, yet it sits on top of the money league. In fact, it has moved up, displacing Manchester United, last year’s financial champions.

And Manchester United’s position merely underlines that winning isn’t everything, for this is another club that hasn’t won anything major lately – its last Premier League title came in 2003.

So it’s not all about results. No surprise here – the secret is marketing: “The mainstay of Real’s revenue growth is not match-day revenues,” the Deloitte report says, “but strong progress in realizing their commercial potential.” Which means sponsorship, merchandising, and licensing – a trio that accounted for 45% of Real’s total income. Manchester United was totally outclassed, with Real taking in $62 million more in commercial revenue.

It’s not wildly off the mark to attribute that huge difference to one player: David Beckham. Real bought Beckham from ManU in 2003 for a fee of $41 million. It was widely assumed that the huge transfer fee reflected not so much the blond-haired Beckham’s playing ability (good, but not world class), as his good looks, his sex appeal, and his glamorous pop-star wife.

For the Real President Florentino Perez, Beckham was the ideal signing – a top player and a marketing dream – and Beckham has come through spectacularly, proving a huge hit, particularly with fans in Asia. But Perez’s attempt to build a winning team by spending millions on star players has been less successful. His expensive collection of galacticos may be breaking commercial records, but it has been having much trouble winning soccer games.

Since 2002, Perez has hired and fired five coaches; Lopez Caro, a virtual unknown hurriedly moved up from his job as coach of Real’s “B” team, took over in December and the galacticos responded by winning nine of their next 11 games. Then, two weeks ago, the team traveled to Real Zaragoza for a King’s Cup game and got hammered 6-1. No one was really shocked by the score; such has been the up-and-down form of Real. Nor was it surprising that Real should stage a stirring fight in the second leg of the series, winning 4-0 in Madrid, but being eliminated from the cup by a 6-5 aggregate score.

That defeat extinguishes one of three chances Real has of winning a title this season. Remaining are the Spanish league title (unlikely, as Real lie third, seven points behind first-place Barcelona), and the European Champions League, in which Real plays the first leg of a mouth-watering home-and-home series with Arsenal in Madrid today.

Despite its six-goal disaster against Zaragoza, Real is considered the favorite. That is it was, until the vagaries inherent in assembling a galaxy of galacticos suddenly made themselves felt.

Yesterday, out of the blue, Brazil’s Ronaldo, who has three times been voted world player of the year, and Real’s top scorer every season since his $42 million signing from Inter-Milan in 2002, detonated a bombshell. He told a news conference that he might choose to leave Real Madrid at the end of this season, claiming that he has never felt at home playing in the club’s Bernabeu stadium. He said he would decide on his future after this summer’s World Cup.

The timing of Ronaldo’s outburst – right before the most crucial game of Real’s season – seems almost designed to disrupt the team. Then again, how does one disrupt a team whose form is so erratic that it can lose 6-1 to Zaragoza, an opponent seven places below it in the standings?

That’s the soccer standings. In the money league, Zaragoza carries about the same weight as world champion Sao Paulo – virtually none. But if the triumphs of Zaragoza and Sao Paulo suggest that money is not so important after all, that would be an utterly false conclusion.

Sao Paulo’s triumph over Liverpool will have little impact. It was widely regarded as a lucky win, and the most noticeable consequence was that Real Madrid promptly signed Sao Paulo’s best player, Cicinho – a move that merely confirmed the decades-old talent drain from South America to Europe.

There will always be occasional victories for the poorer clubs, but European soccer is now dominated, as never before, by a small group of rich clubs. Consider the top 10 in the money league. It includes, in their respective domestic leagues, four teams currently in first place (Chelsea, Juventus, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich),two in second place (AC Milan and Manchester United), three in third place (Real Madrid, Liverpool, and Inter-Milan), plus fifth-place Arsenal.

The message is clear: The top level of Europe’s top leagues is out of reach to clubs that don’t have plenty of money.

pgardner@nysun.com