ENGLAND'S success in Berlin was no fairy story but there was a football tale with a touch of the Brothers Grimm about it happening in Germany.
While Martin O'Neill and Aston Villa hope to demonstrate their readiness to bust apart the Premiership's Big Four against Manchester United tomorrow, the Bundesliga's elite have already been usurped.
The village team of Hoffenheim are in second place, above the mighty Bayern Munich, Martin Jol's Hamburg and one-time European Cup winners Borussia Dortmund.
Only five seasons ago, Hoffenheim – from a hamlet in south-western Germany with only 3,000 inhabitants – were in the fifth tier of the national game there.
Eighteen years ago, they were eight rungs down; which is when the money came in. You guessed that was coming, didn't you. This isn't a fully-fledged Cinderella tale.
Instead, a computer software billionaire, Dietmar Hopp, who played for the team in the Fifties, is behind Hoffenheim's rise, which meant they had two players in the German squad in Berlin on Wednesday.
Hoffenheim offer a story of transformation more remarkable than that of Chelsea and the impending attempt to make Manchester City a superpower using Arab wealth.
Their success makes you realise that it remains far more difficult for the Premiership's middling clubs to change England's power structure than it was for a park team to make it to the top in Germany.
Villa, fresh from a win at Arsenal, will overtake United if they win tomorrow. They had four players in Capello's fledgling squad in Berlin. Backed – not extravagantly – by a mega-rich US owner, Randy Lerner, we cannot yet know if they are the team who will end the monopoly of the top four places exercised by Chelsea, United, Liverpool and Arsenal. But what is sure is that O'Neill has a remarkable record of punching above his weight.
A top-four place – perhaps even just once at first – is, of course, the key. It brings the prospect of Champions League group stage football. Regular participation and the multi-millions it secures is precisely the reason the Big Four's power has become so entrenched.
Everton are struggling to find the foreign investment they say they require to challenge the big boys.
But what if they had progressed beyond the qualifying rounds of the Champions League in 2005, when they were the last team outside of the familiar quartet to claim a top-four place?
A decent run would have brought in millions which, you guess, would have been spent wisely by the excellent David Moyes. That, in turn, might have produced further success and income, providing the basis for a serious assault on the top.
Now it is Villa's turn to batter at the glass ceiling. Their timing may be better than Everton's because Arsenal are beginning to look flawed by inconsistencies. Boardroom uncertainty and global economic troubles may threaten Liverpool's long-term power.
It may turn out to be a bun-fight with newly-rich City to see who gets among the big boys first. Surely, the neutrals' backing has to go to Villa because of the under-stated style and methods of Lerner and O'Neill, who are concerned with building and developing a team from within rather than buying one off the peg; and who are utterly committed to strengthening the club's role as a pillar of its community rather than estranging it from them by wealth.
Lerner even gave up £3million of sponsorship income to place the name of the Acorns children's charity on the club's shirts this season. Now that is a fairy-tale.
City, who have an excellent manager in Mark Hughes and a productive youth policy, may be changed by their new riches, which would be a shame. You hope not.
But it is a possibility.
They are popular beyond their own support because they are seen as a "proper" football club. But teams which are bought wholesale by new money soon lose such popularity. Hopp's Hoffenheim outfit are admired by many in Germany because he has built up the club steadily over nearly two decades rather than fashion some garish, big-spending plaything.
They still play in a stadium with a 5,000 capacity while they await a new arena next year. Their fast, attacking game wins much praise too.
Ironically, though, they are despised by supporters of the middle-ranking clubs outside of the elite, who are incensed that wealth has catapulted Hoffenheim beyond them.
Football romance doesn't come cheaply these days. Neither in terms of its price in hard cash nor the resentment it breeds among envious rivals. One thing is certain, though; it will cost multi-millions more for anyone to smash England's power structure than it did for the village team of Hoffenheim to shake up the Bundesliga.
Video 
