BILLY BUNTER

Weblog: The football punter

Distorted value making things confusing

FINDING value in a football match is hard enough as it is without big clubs distorting the meaning of the word and making it even more confusing for us punters.

For example, I think that at the prices Levante look value to beat Atletico Madrid in Sunday's La Liga fare – people are saying Levante's bubble has burst but I think Atletico remain too unreliable – yet how can I possibly know what value means when Andre Villas-Boas is saying that Fernando Torres was value at £50m?

Maybe the meaning has switched and value now means "an absolute rip-off".

More evidence of that theory comes, unsurprisingly, from those great value-distorters at the City of Manchester Stadium.

City are fairly chuffed with their record-breaking annual loss of £194.9m and the chairman has even gone as far as thanking former chief executive Garry Cook for his part in the figures released on Friday.

Do City's owners really think they are getting good value? Or even better, maybe the aim of life these days is just to lose as much money as possible, in which case I need to re-evaluate my punting over the last couple of weeks because I've actually been doing brilliantly.