Moneyball: how football continues to boom as the world struggles with economic woe Real Madrid's pursuit of Gareth Bale could end up costing them a world record transfer fee. IT'S increasingly hard to know if it is money that makes the world go round, or football that makes the money go round. As Gareth Bale pleads with Tottenham to be allowed to join Real Madrid for a new world record transfer fee, never has the game looked more recession-proof to the extent of creating its own parallel economic universe. Real stand ready to part with $A133m to secure the services of a player whose combination of power, pace and technique is deemed peerless in world football. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised by now that Real's financials are themselves effectively peerless, but still - the club's offices stand a short way across Madrid from the Spanish politicians desperately seeking a way out of five years of economic woe. This week the Spanish government was "celebrating" the fact its economy only shrank by a tiny amount in the most recent quarterly figures, and that the jobless count fell to "only" 5.98m - still more than a quarter of the labour force. But still there's the sense that nuclear war and a flesh-eating pandemic could sweep the land, and still Real and Barcelona would be stalking the world's elite footballers with their back pockets full of blank cheques. It's hard to know what Willie Groves would make of it, 120 years after the inside forward became the first player to transfer for 100 pounds. Aston Villa were the purchasers then, but remarkably only once in the past 60 years has an English club held the world record for a transfer - Alan Shearer's move to Newcastle from Blackburn for $A25m set the benchmark in 1996, but only for a year until Inter bought Ronaldo for $A32m a year later from Barcelona. That highlighted a decade when Serie A was the envy of the world, technically superb and so flush that a succession of Italian sides held the world record from 1984 until Newcastle's landing of Shearer. The Premier League is hardly a poor relation now of course, with Manchester City alone likely to have paid out $A167m by the end of this transfer window, and Arsenal desperate to swap parsimony for profligacy and prise Luis Suarez away from Liverpool for a cool $A84m. Again, that comes against a broader UK economy limping towards recovery, with an unemployment rate of more than 2.5m, or almost eight per cent of the labour force, yet broadcasters put billions into the English game as if in some post-economic nirvana where the word recession falls out of use. To get an idea of how inflated is the EPL industry, consider the fact that next season, the side that finishes bottom will still earn more than the $A102m that Manchester United earned for coming top last May. But the fact that United can offer upwards of $50m to Barcelona for Cesc Fabregas, and be told it's no deal no matter what they put on the table shows the vacuum inside which the two Spanish giants seem to operate. For if Real do win a stare off with Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy and succeed in buying Bale, they'll wrest the mantle of world record fee payers from ... themselves. As they did in 2009 in spending $A134m on Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United, beating the $A94m they paid to AC Milan for Kaka the same year. In fact Real have established the last four record deals, as if to prove that Spanish footballing virility can be measured on and off the pitch.