Tottenham have mastered the transfer game and are wiping the floor with Arsenal Roberto Soldado (£26 million), Paulinho (£17 million), Étienne Capoue (£9 million), Nacer Chadli (£7 million) and probably Willian (£30 million) and Erik Lamela (£20 million) are a spectacular response to the expected loss of Bale. Notice that Spurs spent their £100 million before the selling clubs could exploit the Bale divided by raising the asking price. By this tactic, Daniel Levy, the chairman, and Baldini (technical director) have saved money on fees, improved the team dramatically and played hardball with Real Madrid over Bale, who started out on this trajectory with a £5 million down-payment from Tottenham to Southampton in May 2007. The total fee back then - £10 million - was notable for setting a record for a Welsh player, exceeding the £7.5 million for John Hartson from West Ham to Wimbledon. Now, Bale becomes a factor in a huge global economic story. With Spain's economy ravaged, the story goes, Real Madrid need to roll back the Premier League's tanks in Far Eastern markets, with Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo the flashing cartoon heroes to match Lionel Messi and Neymar at Barcelona. Deal completion was always a crucial element in football, but we have come a long way from the tour of the stadium and reassurance for the parents from one of the great dugout patriarchs that their boy would be in safe hands. Nowadays the manager is the head of the football department, his fate shaped by the men who compete for the world's 30-40 A-list players. The Levy, Baldini, Villa-Boas trident is poking Arsenal where it hurts. The Gunners are trapped between Arsène Wenger's unchallengeability and the ineffectiveness of their recruitment drives. The pursuits of Gonzalo Higuaín and Luis Suárez produced only more news conference hell for Wenger and rancour among Arsenal's fans, who are now asked to switch their excitement to Karim Benzema, by definition the club's third-choice target. Arsenal's transfer strategy, which was unusually transparent this summer - another sign of desperation, perhaps - began as a statement of financial majesty and has descended into another scramble. In fact, to call it a strategy is to invest it with more grandeur than it deserves. In a single week, Arsenal have lurched from a mass walkout during the defeat to Aston Villa to more promised-land euphoria with the apparent Champions League group stage qualification at Fenerbahce. Wednesday night's upswing could not conceal the hollowness in thinking that group stage participation is an alternative kind of trophy. Arsenal's acquisition combo is Stan Kroenke (owner), Ivan Gazidis (chief executive), Wenger and Dick Law (contract negotiator). Clearly Spurs are wiping the floor with them, which can only lead in the long term to Arsenal being the weaker neighbour. After Robin van Persie's decisive move from the Emirates to Manchester United last year, which largely settled the title race to Manchester City's cost, the richest owners are bound to place yet more faith in those executives who come back with the bone. So Wenger's stance is increasingly anomalous. He is the idealist dictator who wants the club run in his image. But he can no longer unearth a Thierry Henry or Patrick Vieira by instinct or scouting alone. Wenger still believes in his own touch and vision. But moneyball is really a sideshow. The elite now behave like global corporations, swallowing up the game's prime assets for sums stretching towards £100 million. The new masters of this trade could easily be sharking around the City of London. In a world where a small group of players make the difference between this billionaire's team and that oligarch's ensemble, getting the major target through the door becomes the raison d"être. Arsenal cannot, or will not, grasp this. Does Jamaica want to find drugs cheats? When Jamaica replaced America as the world HQ of sprinting in the wake of the Balco scandal a lot of us felt a mix of excitement and trepidation. The anxiety stemmed from the knowledge that dope-testing was chaotic on the island that is home to Usain Bolt. The romance was largely crushed when five stars of Jamaican track and field failed tests, including Asafa Powell and Sherone Simpson. In Sports Illustrated, Renee Anne Shirley, a former leading anti-doping official, called it a "category-five hurricane" and revealed that not a single out-of-competition test was conducted in the three months leading up to London 2012. Anti-doping campaigns work only when the political will exists to catch cheats. After Jamaican athletes dominated the World Championships in Moscow, Shirley wrote: "I urged the authorities in Jamaica to get more serious about anti-doping before a scandal hit us. I had long had reason for concern. I quietly tried to point out the presence of Jamaican threads linked to the Balco case via the testimony of Angel [Memo] Heredia about his contacts with elite Jamaican athletes. My position is that these threads, no matter how thin, should not be brushed aside as malice, but treated seriously, as they represent a potential threat to the integrity of our athletes and our nation. She failed, she said, because Jamaica believes it "does not have a problem." Or perhaps, prefers not to find one? Australia look for positives in defeatism A curious admission from Mickey Arthur, the sacked Australia coach, that his team came here not to win the Ashes so much as write a spying dossier. "We wanted to try and push England really hard in England, but we wanted to win in Australia," Arthur says. We didn't go into the series ever to lose it but we wanted to develop enough intelligence on all the England players. We were going to push them close and give the players and our team the confidence to see that England could get beaten and then go for them in Australia. This bizarre defeatism contains a grain of truth. Australia will feel this is how the winter will work out.