Trying to buy success on the sports field has always been an iffy business. To underline the point: The two biggest, most wealthy, and most glamorous soccer clubs in the world are struggling. Instead of their customary positions atop the standings, Manchester United lies fourth in the English Premier League and Real Madrid is 10th in La Liga.

Neither is playing particularly well, certainly not consistently well. The cause of the malaise may well be money. Not too little, obviously – but too much, spent with what looks like reckless abandon.

Real are the bigger spenders. In 2000, they paid $56 million to bitter rival Barcelona to get the Portuguese star Luis Figo. The following year, they paid the Italian club Juventus a world record fee of $66 million for French midfielder Zinedine Zidane. A further $50 million was paid out in 2002 to bring in Brazilian goal-scorer Ronaldo from Inter Milan. Then, in June 2003, came the $44 million purchase of David Beckham…from Manchester United.

The English club promptly paid half that fee to Portugal’s Sporting Lisbon club for its winger, Cristiano Ronaldo. He joined an already star-laden team that included defender Rio Ferdinand, whom ManU had bought from Leeds United in 2002 for a British record fee of $52 million.

ManU equaled that record last month when it bought teenager Wayne Rooney, the wunderkind of English soccer, from Everton. Such massive spending demands results. Yet neither club won a major title last season, and both are off to a poor start this year.

Real Madrid has changed its coach – twice – since last season, so far with little positive effect. ManU’s hopes for better times are firmly linked to Rooney. Certainly his debut for the club was sensational – a hat trick scored against the Turkish club Fenerbahce in a Champions League game.

Four days later, with the superlatives still reverberating in the English press, Rooney made his Premier League debut with United. No hat trick this time, in fact not much of anything: The lad produced an uninspired performance and ManU settled for a disappointing 1-1 home tie with Middlesbrough.

While we are all learning, yet again, that there is no obvious connection between high spending in the market and high scoring on the field, ManU managed to shock the soccer world with some disturbing financial news. In releasing its trading figures for the past year, the club reported that its profits had dropped off by nearly $20 million from the previous year. What shocked was not the size of the loss, but the revelation that the club had paid out $15 million in fees to players’ agents.

Agents have to be licensed by FIFA. To get this license, they must have an “impeccable reputation,” pass a written test, and either secure professional liability insurance, or deposit a bank guarantee of $80,000, to which only FIFA has access. There are, at the moment, 1,940 such agents operating throughout the world. England tops the world soccer-agent table with 244, way ahead of second-place Italy, which has 153.

Despite the respectability of their FIFA licenses, the activities of agents in soccer have long been cloaked in secrecy and silence. There was plenty of evidence in 1995 that all was far from well when Arsenal fired its coach George Graham, who was then suspended for a year by the English Football Association.

Graham had been involved in highly questionable transfer deals set up by a Norwegian agent, Rune Hauge. Graham had purchased several very ordinary players for Arsenal; of the transfer fee paid by Arsenal, only about half went to the selling club. The rest was taken by Hauge as his fee – and was then split with Graham. In one of these deals, Hauge had paid $450,000 into an offshore account of Graham’s.

When challenged, both Hauge and Graham insisted they had done nothing illegal. Hauge maintained that Graham had never asked for the money – it was a gift. So where was the crime?

The Graham affair caused English soccer to engage in some rather public, but not very deep, soul-searching. An attempt to set up a government-controlled regulatory body for the sport was sidetracked. Instead, a so-called Independent Football Commission was set up in 2002.

Described as “football’s self-regulatory body,” it was far from independent and really rather toothless. It was there to give advice, but had no power to impose its recommendations.

That is still the case. When ManU revealed the size of its payments to agents, the IFC issued a statement in which it praised ManU for making the figures public. What it failed to point out was that ManU’s transparency policy was only adopted after it came under heavy criticism earlier this year for extensively using the services of a player agency that employed one Jason Ferguson … the son of the ManU coach, Sir Alex Ferguson.

The IFC asked one obvious question in response to ManU’s disclosure that it had paid $2 million to the Dutch agent Rodger Linse to renegotiate the contract of Ruud van Nistelrooy: Should such payment “not be the player’s financial obligation?”

Apparently not. The agents, explained ManU’s chief executive David Gill, “are providing a service. A footballer’s ability is in his feet. He is not used to doing deals. We want to buy players. We would not have paid this money out if we were not comfortable with it.”

ManU’s fees to agents and every other detail of its balance sheet have for some time now been closely followed on this side of the Atlantic by Tampa Bay Bucaneers owner Malcolm Glazer, who has been steadily increasing his shareholding in the English club. It now stands at 19.2%, and a takeover bid is apparently under way.

Manchester United PLC confirmed yesterday that it has “received a preliminary approach regarding a possible offer for the company. This approach contains a number of significant conditions. The company is seeking clarification of this proposal and at this stage it is unclear whether any offer will be made.”

American ownership for one of the world’s top soccer clubs? Why not, in this increasingly globalized sport? Here in the U.S., the Mexican club Chivas will next year operate a club in MLS. In England, the sudden takeover of Chelsea by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovic has caused barely a ripple.

Abramovic, in fact, may be in the process of doing what ManU and Real Madrid are finding so difficult – buying success. In just over a year, he has spent $350 million on players. And Chelsea sits in second place in the Premier League.