Manchester City are bigger than Barcelona when it comes to the value of their 'brand'.

As the analysts were falling over themselves to point out that neighbours United have become the world’s first billion-dollar brand, according to a report by Brand Finance, the real story was lurking a little lower down.

The Blues have moved up the table to fourth, keeping their noses in front of Chelsea and pushing the newly-crowned European champions down to sixth.

Talk of a football brand is usually enough to set the average football fan’s teeth on edge. It speaks of a world of plastic foreign fans, over-priced club duvet covers and news that your beloved team now has an official paint partner in Taiwan.

But the upside is that such stuff is necessary if you want your team to be in there pitching for trophies, and squaring up to the best in the Champions League every season.

So news that City are now worth 800million dollars (£523m) as a brand is quite staggering, and is testimony to the work done in developing City as a global phenomenon.

Much is made of the money that Blues owner Sheikh Mansour has spent in getting City up to speed on the pitch in the last seven seasons, and the investment he has made in the club’s academy and community facilities has also been highlighted.

But what is often neglected is the commercial side of the operation, which was ramped up by the club hierarchy and has become the driving force behind City’s move towards being a profit-making club.

See our gallery of City's clash with Barcelona in March

One major factor which sets the Blues above Barcelona is the size of the Premier League’s collective television deal, after a £5.1billion deal was agreed with Sky last year.

But City have also followed United into the huge, and expanding markets of the Far East and North America in recent years, and that dynamic push to increase their fan base, and find new partners and sponsors who want to be associated with a successful team, has paid off.

City have set up sister clubs in New York and Melbourne as well as acquiring a minority stake in Japanese outfit Yokohama F Marinos, to help them build a truly global brand.

Chief executive Ferran Soriano explained the logic last year: “English clubs in general enjoy the advantage of a very strong local market and haven’t had to think about the global opportunities but Manchester United did in the 1990s.

“All these brands are huge but the revenue generated is relatively small. This logic of wanting to be relevant globally is the logic that took us to do something very different and to have local clubs.”