Why would Kaka want to join Manchester City?

When Kaka won the Champions League with AC Milan in 2007, he stripped off his shirt to reveal a vest bearing the slogan "I belong to Jesus", an even more glaring case of third-party ownership than the already tiresome Carlos Tevez saga raging at the time.

He is a sweet boy, Kaka, perfectly happy in what he considers to be the home of football and European sophistication in Milan, and I think we can all agree that something rather fine will have been lost should he ever have to celebrate Manchester City avoiding relegation by running around Eastlands in a T-shirt declaring: "I belong to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan".

It still might not happen. The sort of money City have been quoted as offering Milan would bring anyone to the table over any player, but leading Italian clubs have a little more style than to allow their iconic players to be treated as pieces of meat, and it could well be left to the player himself to make the final decision. All the money in the world could persuade Kaka to leave Milan, in other words, but could it persuade him to join Manchester City?

According to his representatives, wages alone would not turn Kaka's head, not even a reported £13m per year. The status of the club is just as important, and Kaka would never do a Robinho – the player's spokesman, Diogo Kotscho, actually used those words – and join an uncompetitive team simply to earn more.

The problem for City is that even with Wayne Bridge in the bag, they still look a pretty uncompetitive team. The league table says so. The FA Cup result against Nottingham Forest says so. Heck, even Mark Hughes says so. The City manager reckons it will take several transfer windows and at least a couple of years before his club and Sheikh Mansour's money reach their manifest destiny, which is tantamount to saying City are nowhere at the moment and possibly need to start the whole thing again from scratch, perhaps retaining Robinho and Stephen Ireland to build a new side around.

Why should Kaka, at 26, sign up for that? It sounds like City might be ready to fly around the time he is approaching his 30s and looking for one last pay day from Everton or Bolton Wanderers. Even Hughes is not pretending the next year or two will be pretty, and the current manager cannot guarantee he will be around to supervise the transformation. Keep your eye on Manchester City v Wigan Athletic this weekend, in fact. Lose that – and City's record against Wigan is far from convincing – and the feasibility of the whole revolution under Hughes would come under the closest scrutiny.

As it probably should. For while it is easy to make headlines by travelling the world throwing money at famous international players, it is much more difficult to do what is ultimately more rewarding and cultivate your own. It was sad to read earlier in the week that City might be prepared to let Michael Johnson go, perhaps as a makeweight in a deal to sign Scott Parker. Injury has restricted Johnson's appearances under Hughes, but last season under Sven-Goran Eriksson the 20-year-old was the future. The new Colin Bell, no less. Perhaps he was never going to rival Kaka for glamour, being born in Urmston and not Brasilia, but Johnson was tipped for great things, and he belongs to Manchester. Like Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville. Unlike that trio, he may have to look elsewhere to further his career.