So much for football living in a golden bubble, fully immunised against and independent from the real world.

In the unlikely case that anyone still believed that going into this summer, surely recent events have shown the opposite.

It's not just Rangers restarting from the bottom up.

It's Manchester United, the world's most profitable club before the Glazers rolled into town, being forced to launch an IPO (initial public offering) on the New York stock exchange after it became obvious that neither London nor Singapore nor Hong Kong would swallow the tripe they are trying to sell. ('Hey, wanna buy a share which gives you no voting rights and no dividends and will only be worth something if we manage to sell the club... except we have no intention of doing so for the foreseeable future and besides, the guy who's been running the club almost single-handedly for the past quarter century turns 71 this year?')

And, of course, it's Champions' League bound Malaga, the folks who spent around £55 milion last summer on the likes of Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Jeremy Toulalan, Santi Cazorla and others. Now, the bottom has fallen out. The official club website speaks of "financial restructuring" by the Qatari owner.

That's a neat euphemism. Fernando Hierro, the former Real Madrid legend and technical director of the Spanish FA, bolted from his job as Malaga's sporting director back in the spring. Wages and instalments on transfer fees were becoming due, with no indication of where the money was going to come from. Ground was being broken on plans for a fancy academy and a new 60,000 stadium (the third largest in Spain, after Barcelona's Camp Nou and Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu) but Hierro simply could not see where the money to pay for all this would come from. It seemed that cash injections were always "a phone call away" but simply never materialised. Fearing for his own reputation, Hierro resigned even as the side went on a run to fourth place.

The Qatari owner, Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser Al Thani, initially talked of further investment, but that soon fizzled out and by last week it appeared that he had put the club up for sale. Meanwhile, players were leaving. Cazorla was sold to Arsenal at a loss, Van Nistelrooy has retired, Toulalan is up for sale, along with Nacho Monreal, Isco, Diego Buonanotte and Joris Mathijsen. Manuel Pellegrini, the manager they brought in from Real Madrid, has reportedly also been asked to find a new club.

It's easy to lampoon Sheikh Abdullah Al Thani, starting with this whole Qatari royal business. Yes, apparently he is a distant relative of the Emir, but, no, that doesn't mean he has access to a limitless fortune. He saw promise in the project of Malaga, he simply didn't have the liquidity to follow through. Whatever relatives or friends initially bank-rolled the club eventually changed their minds and he was left on his own. He basically took a gamble with other people's money and lost. And now he's likely going to walk away.

The parallel with the Glazers is too obvious to ignore. They've been gambling with other people's money since taking over the club. And, yes, it may be the banks' money and nobody likes bankers, but still, it amounts to some serious rolling of the dice. Like saddling the club with nearly half a billion pounds' worth of debt. Or taking £30m to £40m out of the club every year (fortunately for them, United make a huge profit) just to service the debt.

Sure, unlike Al Thani, the Glazers are actually pretty good at what they do: squeezing more money out of fans. Club revenues have increased and – so they claim – has the value of Manchester United. But the key feature they share is that they have very little of their own invested in the club.

You would hope the sight of Malaga's fire sale or Manchester United's begging IPO, designed to relieve debt pressures, serves as enough of a warning to the powers that be: owners and their business plans ought to be fully vetted before certain types are allowed to buy in. Of course, we know better than to hold our breath-

The Olympic Men's Football Tournament final eight consisted of two Asian nations, two from Concacaf and two from Africa. Europe and South America, the traditional powers, were left with just one each: Great Britain and Brazil.

Yes, you don't want to read too much into it because, hey, it's the Olympics, and this is basically just a glorified youth tournament with freak results and, besides, real football is coming up real soon.

But all that said it's still remarkable. Especially since – make no mistake about it – Spain and Uruguay, two of the more illustrious early victims, actually were trying hard to win it. Maybe 2014 will surprise us after all.

The Premier League's new Under-21 competition promises to "bridge the gap" between academies and first-team football. It's really not that different from before, except teams will be limited to three over-age outfield players (bit like the Olympics, no?), games will be national rather than regional (with 23 teams split into three groups- don't ask) and a bizarrely convoluted play-off system will eventually funnel the clubs towards a knockout competition to determine the national champions.

It seems pretty obvious that there will be two side-effects. The first is that, if this tournament is any good, clubs will be more reluctant to send promising youngsters out on loan, because they'll want to win it. Not getting gifted players from clubs up the food chain will hurt those further downstream.

The other is that, if the over-age players can rotate – seemingly from week to week – then it's really not much of a tournament. As ever, you'll get clubs taking it seriously who might actually send down first-teamers as their over-age guys. And you'll get others who will only ever use over-age scrubs. Or maybe no over-age players at all.

You also wonder about the need for an actual tournament. Wasn't this whole thing supposed to be first and foremost about development?