The contest between Manchester City, Liverpool, Spurs and Aston Villa for the final Champions League spot is set to be fiercer than the title race

It is time for the also-rans to accelerate. The race for fourth place in the Premier League can seldom have been so keen. The usual cartel was broken open in 2005, but that proved academic. Despite coming fifth, behind Everton, Liverpool still qualified for the Champions League as holders. This year Rafael Benítez’s team have no such comfort. Ambition and anxiety will be at their most intense. By comparison, the vying for the title itself seems humdrum in its familiarity.

The realistic contenders for the last Champions League spot are Manchester City, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa. If investment was decisive the outcome would already be known. City’s expenditure has been great, but it is also accompanied by unease over the true standard of the recruits and the quality of the manager. In this little group of rivals, they alone have ditched the person who led them at the beginning of the campaign.

While the sacking of Mark Hughes was ruthless, it appeared to have an icy shrewdness. There had been only two victories in the previous 11 league games, but eyes were also fixed on the promising matches immediately before City. The new manager Roberto Mancini made the most of the opportunity and racked up victories over Stoke City, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Blackburn Rovers. A more forbidding step followed and the side keeled over at Goodison.

City must have anticipated that Mancini would show the expertise that brought success to Internazionale, but impact was restricted when only the subdued January transfer window was open to him. Patrick Vieira could be seen simply as a short-term signing and the involvement is abbreviated further now that he must serve a three-match ban. All in all, City’s situation is slightly less promising than it looks.

While the team are presently fourth with a game in hand, they have still to play Liverpool, tomorrow, as well as Chelsea, Tottenham, Manchester United, Arsenal and Aston Villa. City have already defeated Arsenal and Chelsea as part of their unbeaten home record, but there is much still to be examined and reports of player unrest over Mancini’s methods are unsettling.

Misgivings exist about all clubs striving for a new status. There is, for instance, a volatility to the Tottenham squad that can lose home and away to Wolves, a side 16th in the table. Stoke’s single league victory on the road also came at White Hart Lane. It is a hindrance that Aaron Lennon has not yet been fit to play in 2010 but Tottenham, who have scored only three goals in their last six league games, do not get quite enough out of the talent on the books, despite seeming well-served in most departments.

Aston Villa, by comparison, are no conundrum at all. The best defensive record in the Premier League is not merely commendable but critical to whatever hope Martin O’Neill still holds of entry to the Champions League. Goals have been infrequent and the manager would have been fully aware before the campaign that he did not possess a consistent scorer. Gabriel Agbonlahor reached double figures in the league with two goals against Fulham at the end of last month, but other contributions are meagre.

The side have an admirable midfield, yet they are creators who have little of the striker about them. The combined tally from that area is seven league goals. James Milner has supplied four and ­Ashley Young has come up with the other three. Stewart Downing and Stilian Petrov are yet to find the net at all in the competition. More broadly, Villa have drawn a blank in five of their past seven league games. There are real virtues to the line-up, but development will hinge on finding the means to strengthen the attack and to persuade the preferred candidate that Villa Park is the right destination.

All in all, any optimism expressed by Liverpool is likely to be genuine. That conclusion seems odd in view of the poverty of their play at times. A lumbering 1-0 win over Unirea Urziceni in the Europa League on Thursday was mocked, but it was still a useful result. The Romanian side are not as inept as some would suggest and had a better record than Liverpool in the group phase of the Champions League, even if both clubs were eliminated. Benítez has steadied Liverpool to a degree, and the narrow loss to Arsenal at the Emirates had been preceded by a sequence of seven unbeaten matches in the league.

Steven Gerrard also seemed closer to top form against Unirea, particularly when he took a ball on his chest before cracking a drive that missed narrowly. The midfielder has struggled to recover his dynamism and the usual knocks seemed to take longer to ease off, but his condition will be critical to Liverpool. Regardless of the outcome against City tomorrow, a re-emergence from the treatment room of Fernando Torres in the next few weeks could be decisive. When the Spaniard last took the field in the league he scored the only goal of the match at Villa Park on 29 December.

There is some monotony in the prospect of the usual quartet taking their places at the top of the table, but the challenge is for others to supplant them.

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• Winning FA Cup run could have been worth £8m
• Investors may be put off by damage to club’s image

Liverpool’s early exit from the FA Cup will cost the club around £8m compared with the sum they would have received for winning the competition, but the blow to their reputation could be even greater at a time when the owners are hunting for new investment.

While comparatively small beer compared with the cost of their failure to progress in the Champions League, and insignificant next to the doomsday scenario of finishing outside the top four, the effect will be felt at a club where the balance sheet is under constant scrutiny.

Last year’s FA Cup winners, Chelsea, earned around £5m in TV and prize money and made in the region of £3m in receipts. The winners of this year’s competition will receive £3.8m in prize money, plus £200,000 for each televised match in the third and fourth rounds and £300,000 for each match in the fifth and sixth rounds, plus gate receipts. There is no television fee for semi-final or the final.

The limited funds made available to the manager Rafael Benítez during the transfer window, injuries to key players and the improved form of Manchester City have raised fears that they may fail to qualify for next season’s Champions League.

Failure to qualify for this season’s knockout phase cost the club only £2.4m in budgetary terms, according to managing director, Christian Purslow, in the wake of their pre-Christmas exit.

But if they miss out on next season’s tournament, which has been the key driver in maintaining the balance of power in the Premier League in recent years, they would miss out on a huge slice of revenue.

Last season the Champions League was worth €23.3m (£20.7m) to Liverpool but next season’s bounty will be even higher because Uefa has sealed improved sponsorship and TV deals in the interim.

Purslow is continuing to search for new investors willing to meet Tom Hicks’ and George Gillett’s asking price of £100m for a 25% stake in the club. The managing director has said he is confident of securing fresh investment – which would also help revive plans for a new stadium– before the beginning of next season, but cautioned that “the devil is in the detail”.

The club will also have to renegotiate outstanding bank loans in July, a situation that could also be complicated by finishing outside the top four.

Following protracted negotiations the Royal Bank of Scotland and the US bank Wachovia renewed the club’s £350m credit facility, of which £290m had been used, in July. But the agreement, made on the condition that the debt was paid down by £60m, is understood only to last 12 months. The club’s parent company, Kop Holdings, recorded a loss of £42.6m in 2007-08, partly due to £36.5m in interest payments on the loans.

Professor Tom Cannon, a finance specialist at Liverpool University, feels that Reading’s third-round victory could impact on the search for new investment. “It’s the effect on the image. It’s much easier to raise money for a club that is at the top or seems to be going to the top than a club that seems to be going in the other direction,” he said.

Professor Simon Chadwick, head of sports business at Coventry University, agreed. “The FA Cup is not the biggest earner for the clubs but it still very important commercially and financially. More importantly, and given where the FA Cup is broadcast, it can affect a club’s global aspiration.

“Going out of the FA Cup is only one small part of a bigger picture of which the main part is making the Champions League group phase. But in terms of sending the right signals, this is the last thing that Liverpool needed.”

Cannon also predicted that Liverpool’s ongoing malaise on the pitch would start to impact on the amount that potential investors would be prepared to pay for a minority stake.

“They still see Liverpool in the same bracket as Manchester United and Real Madrid, in terms of the value they place on the club and the stadium they want. Until their expectations change, I think it will be hard to get the new investment they need.”But he said that qualification for the Champions League remained the crucial factor in enabling the club to maintain income at current levels.

“Given the current distribution in English football, the £30m, £40m, £50m you get from the Champions League is the key differentiator. Getting to the semi-final is worth £46m to £47m. Add in a few other factors like the increase in brand value, and it’s more profitable than winning the League.”

Cannon said that having handed Benítez a large transfer budget and backed him in his power struggle against the former chief executive Rick Parry, the owners were now faced with a difficult choice. He estimated that sacking the Spaniard would cost at least £12m.

“For all the huffing and puffing, they can still service their debt. But servicing the debt, rebuilding the squad and building a new stadium is a different matter,” said Cannon. “It is hard to see how they will service the debt, rebuild the squad to the stage where they can get first or second place, and build the stadium unless Hicks and Gillett reassess what the club is worth.”

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