No one can buy the league nowadays. You can certainly buy a large pool of world-class players, but they still have to be coached into playing as a team in a certain way. That takes more than a top manager too. What City have done is to raise the bar in terms of performance levels, and Liverpool have finally managed to get to that level and exceed it, for the time being.
. There are enough pedants on this message board to have said so a long time ago if it was wrong. Manchester United are a single entity.