TIPPING POINT:The current spat between Roberto Mancini and Carlos Tevez neatly encapsulates modern football's toxic reality, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR

I DON’T know how much Roberto Mancini earns as manager of Manchester City and don’t particularly want to know. But it is important to remember in the continuing fallout from Carlos Tevez’s Munich hissy-fit that whatever Mancini makes, it ain’t as much as “El Apache”. And that’s really the central conundrum in a controversy that neatly encapsulates modern football’s toxic reality. How can “the boss” boss anyone who’s drawing more money than them?

Who amongst us hasn’t at some time dreamt of telling a superior on the employment pecking order to take a running jump? Or calculated that the one ordering us about has the professional capacity and personal charm of a large stone?

But telling said inadequate what you think of them isn’t really an option if you wish to hang on to the gig. So you sit and suffer and sink resentment down through you, only too painfully aware that when it comes to crap, it rarely if ever flows uphill. Except in football of course; in football it can rise remorselessly to the top, floating atop the beautiful game’s very own gilded septic tank.

Normally players are more subtle than Tevez but the subtext is the same. All the butty son of a Buenos Aries barrio did was actually tell Mancini what he could do, instead of what usually happens: a pout, followed by some preening petulance that is then “exclusively” explained in the following morning’s tabloids by “a friend”. Tevez at least has the virtue of directness, something to cherish considering the absence of much else in his personal locker.

This is a guy reportedly drawing €288,000 a week on his current contract with City. And he wants away from it. Manchester isn’t to Tevez’s liking. Apparently it rains there quite a lot. And the food is crap. And the only way to get warm in the winter is by wrapping up in a seemingly never-ending conveyer belt of throbbing North of England totty on the make.

But all of that is actually irrelevant to the real reason Tevez wants away which is because there’s a good chance some other club owner in Madrid or Milan will pay even more per week for the pleasure of his company.

When it happens, and it really is a case of when, not if Tevez gets his way, Mancini might allow himself a quick sigh of relief before facing a squad of other incredibly well-paid young professionals not unreasonably wondering how they can inflate their own salaries even more with a pout, or a preen, or even a quick word in the ear of one of the owners.

There is an adroitness to all this that doesn’t prevent it from being acutely depressing for fans with a genuine love of a club. But this is the harvest being reaped by football’s owners in producing a generation of players weaned on the assurance that they’re worth it, whatever the best negotiated “it” might be. The result is a lop-sided hierarchy that guarantees things are going to get worse.

Those dealing in nostalgia no doubt pine for the past when discussing player power. But money has always been the all-consuming pulse of professional sport. It’s just that there’s so much more of it in football today, and most of it goes to the players on the basis that nobody has ever paid for a season ticket or a satellite package to watch a manager sitting on the sidelines.

Theoretically, though, a manager remains the figure on top of the footballing food-chain, the one who ultimately decides, or should ultimately decide, who ends up out on the pitch. He’s also the one who mostly carries the can. In the very best clubs, like every organisation, the tone is set at the top, and in almost every other walk-of-life, that responsibility is rewarded in the way that western capitalist society has decided best – money.

So a very real dilemma for modern managers is how to exert any sort of real authority over players who have the financial clout to tell them to eff off any damn time they please. In the old days it was easy. Players needed to play to earn and the manager decided who played. Brian Clough summed it up best with his line in dispute management – “We talk about it for 20 minutes and then we decide I was right.”

This was the man who forked out the first million-pound transfer for Trevor Francis and then promptly told his prize investment to get his hands out of his pockets.

Clough’s authority was rooted in a philosophy that players today simply can’t comprehend. While it may not be particularly noble or edifying, it remains a reality that most authority is defined by fear. It may not have to be colon-evacuating fear, but actions still have to have some consequence or everything dissolves into a scalding pot of anarchy.

And what’s Tevez got to be frightened of? Sitting on his backside drawing over a million a month until the January transfer window and he signs for someone else? No doubt the man with more than a little form in trading in clubs is trembling at the thought.

There are exceptions who still manage to exert authority through sheer force of personality. Alex Ferguson is the perfect example. Arsene Wenger used to be. Jose Mourinho is the epitome of the modern manager who befriends his players while trying to navigate around the fluctuating moods of an egomaniacal owner. But even he couldn’t survive at Chelsea, so what hope has any manager still trying to flex his authority the old-fashioned way?

Roy Keane learned at the knee of Clough who famously once decked the Cork man. Keane got up. Today’s players would have reached for their solicitor before Cloughie had poured his next drink. But Keane is already an incongruity.

Even Championship players decided he was ridiculous as he ranted and raved in the dressing room. And if there’s one thing authority cannot fight, it is laughter.

Few men have ever cut a more ridiculous figure than Charles De Gaulle but the old poseur also knew a thing or two about power and “Le Grande Zohra” believed that nothing strengthened his authority over France better than silence. Many might have laughed at De Gaulle but none did it to his face.

Telling Tevez and Dzeko to eff off back to Argentina and Bosnia respectively might have eased Mancini’s bile in Munich but they were words tinged with more than a little desperation and futility.

Better for his sake to hang back more and keep the dressing room guessing. The way football has gone he can’t win because the game has made its call and the players are in charge.

Their payslips prove it.