They are not the reigning English champions. Neither were they the best team in Europe last season.

But Manchester United proudly sit atop Forbes’ annual Sportsmoney 50-50, which lists the 50 most valuable sports teams and the 50 top-earning athletes in the world.

The finance magazine measures a sports team’s worth by adding their equity and net debt, and Man United’s value as a sporting property came to a whopping US$1.83 billion ($2.5 billion).

Dazzling figures, but forgive us sports fans for feeling just a bit blase about this ranking exercise.

While there is a certain fascination about the sheer wealth accumulated by the best professional sports teams around the world, the list is hardly representative of teams’ current prowess in the sporting arena.

In fact, the whole list reads like a pocket-size historical factoid of past glories.

The second-richest team, American football’s Dallas Cowboys, were five-time Super Bowl champions, with a value of US$1.65 billion. But their last triumph came in 1995, a full 15 years ago.

Baseball’s New York Yankees, third on the list with US$1.6 billion, did win last year’s World Series, but that came after a nine-year drought, in which they threw lots of money around for underachieving players who failed to deliver.

Indeed, the top-earning athlete is still Tiger Woods, despite his scandal-hit public image and poor run of form lately.

The Forbes list, therefore, is a mere summation of past glories, and the top teams usually had a dominant period – the late 1990s for the Yankees, the early 1990s for the Cowboys, and virtually the past two decades for Man United.

The best teams now – European Cup winners Inter Milan and American football’s New Orleans Saints – are just starting to build up their wealth.

But, surely, they will mean more to fans than this list of financial behemoths – especially if some of these rich clubs continue to alienate their loyal supporters with escalating ticket and merchandise prices.

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