By many metrics, when City travel to face United in the Manchester derby, they will do so in the capital of world football. It’s not just the Manchester Tourist Board types saying it, there is plenty to back up that claim.

On the pitch you can debate whether Madrid (Real and Atletico) or London (Arsenal and Chelsea) might outpace them. But when it comes to commercial success – increasingly the benchmark and the pathway to sporting success – no city can lay claim to two juggernauts of this magnitude.

Last years’ Deloitte Football Money League had United second and City sixth; by contrast, Real were first and Atletico 15th, Chelsea seventh and Arsenal eighth, the two Milan clubs 12th and 17th. United’s most recent accounts will show a decline, due to missing out on the Champions League, but already Old Trafford’s projections for 2015-16 have them passing the half billion pound mark. Meanwhile, City’s accounts showed a profit for the first time since the Abu Dhabi takeover in 2008 and, crucially, many of their commercial partners – like Nissan and SAP – aren’t what the financial blogger SwissRamble terms “friendly Arab partners”. In other words, City are growing into a legitimate profit generating business, much like the red half of Manchester.

That’s the financial cheerleading part. You could also look at it a different way. You could point out that United’s majority owners – while undoubtedly doing a fine job at raising revenue – have also cost the club some £850 million in interest payments, debt repayments and professional fees in the past decade. The last two campaigns have yielded nothing in the way of silverware. If they fail to win again this season, it will be the worst trophy drought since the 1980s.

And you could point to City and remind yourself that this was made possible largely by the munificence of an absolute monarch who decided that it was in the interest of his people to get his nation’s sovereign wealth fund to invest in an English club thousands of miles away. In some quarters Sheikh Mansour is hailed as a saintly, altruistic figure for prompting urban regeneration, but you wonder if somewhere back in Abu Dhabi there aren’t folks who wonder whether this is good use of their money. Then again, given that there is no free press and no democratic dialogue and Mansour’s family can’t be voted out of power, it’s rather a moot point. You just hope – for City’s sake – that there’s no Arab spring in the Emirates or that there’s no coup d’etat or that, more simply, they don’t put Abu Dhabi under the same sort of spotlight the Qataris have been facing.

That said, there’s no use complaining. In the current football landscape, these two models – bottomless pit initial investing from a guy who can afford to do so, no questions asked and leveraged buy-out of profitable company with drip-feed of cash going out of the club – are legal, accepted and, most importantly, they work.

One day we’ll likely look back on Sam Allardyce and Steve McClaren as the two finest managers expressed by English football in the decade that followed the turn of the Millennium.

Please, no laughing in the back. It may be a rather shallow pool – in fact, it’s more of a puddle – but while they’ve had their setbacks, they’ve at least succeeded in more than one venue, which is more than you can say for most. Allardyce took Bolton into the Premier League and all the way into European football and then repeated the feat with West Ham. McClaren guided Middlesbrough to a League Cup and the UEFA Cup final and, a few years later, won a league and cup double in Holland’s Eredivisie, with Twente.

Their names have been bandied about by those who believed the England team ought to have an English manager (Allardyce, of course, lost out to McClaren in 2006) and they’ve long been a fallback for those who believe English bosses are victims of discrimination in their own backyard. Allardyce’s comments – “If my name was Allardici...” or “If I managed Real Madrid, Inter or Chelsea, I’d be winning multiple trophies every year” – were roundly mocked and perhaps excessively so. McClaren, possibly because he’s more circumspect, has actually been rewarded with a seemingly endless series of plum jobs (Wolfsburg, Nottingham Forest, a return to Twente, Derby County), despite having achieved little since 2010.

Today, they meet in a Northeast derby which, once again, feels like an early relegation play-off, with both teams in the drop zone. Newcastle won their first game of the season last week – a rip-roaring 6-2 hammering of Norwich – while Sunderland were edged by West Brom, one-nil, in Allardyce’s first game in charge.

The fact that, for both men, stewarding their hapless clubs to safety this season would be seen as an achievement, would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago when many thought they were destined for the top shelf.

Rule 101 of crisis management in PR situations is this: don’t talk unless you have something to say. Otherwise, you’ll look evasive and shifty.

Wolfgang Niersbach, head of the German FA, evidently didn’t get that memo. And neither did his media handlers.

Niersbach, who is also a powerful Fifa and Uefa Executive Committee member, called a press conference on Thursday to address accusations that a slush fund had been set up to pay out bribes in awarding the 2006 World Cup to Germany. At the time, he was in charge of the bid committee, alongside Franz Beckenbauer.

“I don’t want it to look like I am dodging questions... but today I cannot give you a complete explanation,” he told reporters. “I also have question marks regarding the process.”

He said there was no “slush fund” and no “bought votes” but when asked why Fifa were paid some £4.2m to release a further £122m in funds to help organize the tournament, he said: “I do not know.”

Some have joked that it sounds like one of those Nigerian email scams but in truth it’s not a laughing matter. Niersbach’s predecessor as head of the German FA chief, Theo Zwanziger, said on Friday that he has no doubt that a slush fund existed and that Niersbach is “lying.”

Whatever the case, Germany have lost their moral high ground here. And the race for the Fifa presidency is only getting murkier.