Real Madrid recently removed the cross from its historic logo in deference to the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, which recently announced that it was investing ninety million euros in the club. Photograph by David Ramos / Getty

Late last month, Real Madrid, one of the legendary teams of European soccer, changed its historic logo. Real means royal, of course, and the logo was bestowed on the team by King Alfonso XIII, back in 1920: a blue and gold circle containing the initials M.C.F. (for Madrid Club de Fútbol), surmounted by the Spanish crown, on top of which is perched a cross. Or was. Because the cross has now been removed, in deference to the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, which recently announced that it was investing ninety million euros, or about a hundred and ten million dollars, in the club. Real Madrid is already the richest sports team in the world, valued at almost 3.5 billion dollars, and it’s one of the most successful: the club set a new record this week with its nineteenth-straight win; its goal difference in this stretch has been 71-9.

Success in the élite tier of European soccer is increasingly based on an incestuous interchange of talent among the wealthiest clubs, a rule that applies to both players and managers. In England, Chelsea, which sits atop the Barclays Premier League, is the ultimate testament to the free global movement of capital and labor. The club’s most recently acquired megastars, Cesc Fàbregas and Diego Costa, came from Real’s La Liga arch-rivals, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid, respectively, for a combined sixty million pounds (or ninety-four million dollars). Its manager, José Mourinho—the “special one,” as he famously called himself once —is the highest-paid coach in the world, earning twenty-one million dollars a year. Where was he before Chelsea? Real Madrid.

All of this has radically redefined what it means to compete and win at the highest levels of soccer. The roster of contenders has grown narrower and narrower with the increasing disparities in teams’ wealth. In England, there was a time—more than a hundred years, in fact—when teams from smaller markets—Sheffield United, Ipswich Town, Leeds United, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Burnley, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Derby County—often became champions. These clubs were generally owned by local businessmen who had a made million or two out of furniture dealerships or haulage companies. Their fan base was driven by the passionate loyalties of local working-class communities, sometimes even of particular industries—such as steel in the city of Sheffield, where United (“the Blades”) had a blood feud with Sheffield Wednesday F.C., named for the day when steelworkers had their traditional half-day off. The London Premier League team I’ve always rooted for, West Ham United, began life in 1895 as the Thames Ironworks Football Club.

Today, soccer’s fan base is made up less and less of these local loyalties and more and more of rootless attachments to global brands. Live broadcasts of the Premier League now reach a worldwide audience of 4.5 billion, with broadcasting revenues of almost two billion dollars. I joined that global crowd in a hotel room in Vietnam last month, watching Chelsea methodically take apart Liverpool, last year’s runner-up in the league. Chelsea’s squad included four Brazilians, three Spaniards, two Frenchman, two Belgians, one player each from Serbia, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Germany, and the Czech Republic—and just two native-born Englishmen. The first of Chelsea’s two goals in that match resulted from a corner kick by the brilliant Fàbregas; the second was slotted home by Costa. The debate among the studio pundits after the game was whether Chelsea’s assembly of highly paid stars was now so formidable that the team might go through the entire season without once losing.

The discussion then paused for a commercial break—an ad for Manchester United, sponsored by Chevrolet. It featured kids from all over the world kicking a soccer ball around. The kids introduce themselves—Jiang Wei, Brandon Davis, Pablo Alvarez, Riya Sharma, Reza Pratama, Sipho Zungu—and then say, “And I play for Manchester United.”

In 2005, the American Malcolm Glazer (who died this May) bought Manchester United in a hostile takeover worth more than a billion dollars. Since then, the club has won the Premier League five times and become, in the words of the International Business Times, “sport’s most ruthless commercial machine.” Only last year did it finally hit a speed bump, after the departure of its legendary manager, Sir Alex Ferguson. The team finished seventh, eclipsed by rival Manchester City, which as recently as 1998 was playing in the league’s third tier. But after a string of victories this season, United is back in its accustomed place in the top three.

Manchester City’s recent irruption into England’s élite circle typifies the big-money era of men like Glazer and Chelsea’s owner, Roman Abramovich, a Russian oil oligarch with an estimated net worth of 14.2 billion dollars. City’s ascent followed the purchase of the team, in 2008, by the Abu Dhabi United Group, owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family; after spending over two hundred and thirty million pounds to acquire championship-caliber talent, the club won the Premier League for the first time, in the 2011-12 season.

Since the triumph of the little Blackburn Rovers in 1995, only four teams have won the Premier League—Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester City. The majority of the league’s other clubs, who have not a hope of winning, spend much of their time struggling to avoid the last three places in the twenty-team league, which are relegated each year to the second division, with the consequent loss of tens of millions of dollars in broadcasting and gate revenues—which in turn further diminishes their ability to hire star players to help fight their way back.

It’s a similar story in the other leading European soccer nations. Italy’s Serie A has had only three winners since 2001; one of those three, Internazionale, of Milan, came top for five years in a row—twice under the leadership of José Mourinho. Bayern Munich has won Germany’s Bundesliga in six of the past ten years. As for La Liga, in Spain, nine consecutive championships went to either Real Madrid or Barcelona until Atlético picked the lock last year. Atlético’s hopes of continuing to keep pace with the two traditional giants were boosted in October by a new investor—Wang Jianlin, the fourth-richest man in China, with a net worth of 13.2 billion dollars.

In soccer, wealth has become an almost certain guarantee of success; championships are as much bought as earned and, in turn, bring in even more money. That, no doubt, is why poor kids around the world imagine—or at least are asked to imagine for the purposes of a TV commercial—that they “play for Manchester United.” But, less appealingly, it’s also why managers like José Mourinho have come to regard victory as an entitlement, any defeat a kind of lèse-majesté.

I tuned in to NBCSN on Saturday to watch Chelsea play Newcastle, a classic middle-of-the-table side. But Newcastle have recovered of late from a poor start to the season, and astonishingly they ended the presumptive champion’s twenty-three-game unbeaten streak.* The game ended 2-1.

Interviewed afterward, Mourinho growled and scowled, blamed the Newcastle ball boys for costing him the game by wasting time in the final nerve-racking minutes, and declared that “the better team lost.” But in the end, he said with a shrug and a smirk, “It’s only possible one leader, and that leader is Chelsea.”