Owner and out

The foreign ownership merry-go-round in the Premier League is starting to spin out of control - and I have a horrible feeling it is going to end in disaster.

Hardly a day goes by without one billionaire or another being linked with one club or another. At the time of writing, half the clubs in England's top flight have foreign owners, but that number will probably have changed by the time you've finished your cornflakes. And again by lunch.

The latest club to be linked with new owners is Liverpool. Although it is not that long ago they were bought by dumb and dumber from America, the club is now attracting the interest of a young Saudi Arabian prince. He is said to be wary of the club's debt which, being royalty, is probably not a word or concept with which he is overly acquainted.

But as brands go, you don't get much bigger than Liverpool, so expect a concrete move to happen at some point in the near future. After all, this new breed of owner mostly seem interested in buying clubs as status symbols, and they don't come much bigger than Liverpool.

You can almost imagine the next meeting of the billionaire's club:

"So what club did you end up buying?"

"Liverpool. Bags of history and tradition. What about you?"

"Portsmouth. But I'm hoping to upgrade when the oil prices go back up."

I understand that Premier League clubs are an attractive proposition due to the vast amounts of money in the English game and the fact that it is the most popular league in the world, but don't try to tell me these people have the clubs' best interests at heart.

Yes, they will invest heavily and try to buy themselves some glory, like Manchester City are doing - but there will come a time when they get bored of their toys and move on to the next rich man's fad. Baseball perhaps. Or camel racing.

The other possibility is that they will wake up one morning to find the stock markets have crashed and they need to liquidise some assets to fund their lifestyles.

"You need to sell something to raise some cash sir. How about Birmingham?"

"I don't remember buying a city."

"No, the football club."

"Oh. Right. Yes, sell it. It's been costing me a fortune to run and it really isn't as much fun as I thought it would be."

If you want a decent example of how the foreign ownership craze can go horribly wrong, you need look no further than Portsmouth.

They started 2009 owned by a cheeky but likeable Ukranian chap who suddenly realised he no longer had the money to keep the club in the manner to which it had become accustomed.

This led to a wholesale clear-out of players as he desperately tried to balance unbalanceable books. When this didn't work, and with the club dangerously close to going out of business, up stepped Sulaiman al-Fahim from Dubai to buy the club and save the day.

But, just six weeks later, with the wage bill unpaid and the promised investment nowhere to be seen, al-Fahim sold 90 per cent of the club to Ali al-Faraj from Saudi Arabia. Unlike the previous owner, it appears al-Faraj actually has some money, and I doubt we will find him checking under the sofa for loose change to pay the bills. Maybe Portsmouth have actually landed on their feet.

But that doesn't make the whole situation any more palatable. This is a football club we are talking about. An entity which means the world to thousands of people in Portsmouth. A club which has been around for over a hundred years. A club with a proud, if not overly successful, history behind it.

To the owners, Portsmouth FC was little more than an asset to be bought and sold at will, irrespective of what damage was being done to the club and its fans. At the moment, the team is bottom of the table with only one win from eight games, and that, whichever way you look at it, is a direct result of the stupid shenanigans that went on in the boardroom.

Someone asked me recently why few Englishmen ever try to buy clubs. I think it is probably for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there probably aren't that many with the necessary resources to buy the big teams. Secondly, I imagine those that have the cash already support a team and so are reluctant to invest in a rival. Thirdly, they probably appreciate that football is about heritage, not balance sheets.

Having said that, the last Englishman I can think of who did splash the cash on a football team - Mike Ashley at Newcastle - turned out to be a bit of a muppet, so it's probably better that they stay away.

Ultimately, I think football is getting increasingly detached from its roots, and one of the key reasons is that the people who own clubs know little or nothing about their new assets.

They have never stood on the Kop in the rain cheering the team on, they have never spent a night in the pub arguing about which players need to be dropped, and they have never queued in the toilets on match day, bouncing up and down in desperation as 40,000 people try to simultaneously relieve themselves.

They don't know the clubs they own or the towns they are based in and, as such, they shouldn't be allowed to own them. Harsh, maybe, but something I genuinely believe.

So, what's the solution?

Well, here's mine. If the current owners of a club want out, and they are well within their rights to do so, then they should be obliged to give fans the right of first refusal to buy the club.

Let the supporters themselves see if they can raise the cash to own their team and really put their money where they mouths are. It is a system that works well for certain clubs in Spain, and we know there is a group of supporters trying to do the same with Liverpool.

Obviously, it might not always work. Some clubs may not have a sufficiently large fan base - although that should be compensated for by the actual price of the club. But just because it might not always happen is no reason not to make it an option.

The English football authorities need to put the brakes on this swarm of foreign take-overs to protect the long-term interests of the game. And this is one way they can go about starting to redress the balance.

I would be greatly surprised if the FA, Premier League, Uefa or Fifa have anything like the courage needed to introduce this as a rule. Each one of these organisations likes the foreign invasion, which is adding plenty of glamour to their lives.

But they should at least start promoting fan buy-outs as a serious option and see if they can find ways to help this sort of deal go through.

Because the next time a club gets into financial difficulties as a direct result of poor decisions by an overseas owner - like Portsmouth did - there probably won't be another billionaire ready to step in and save them.

Maybe then, when a club is murdered by one of this new breed of good-time Charlies, the powers that run the game will realise they should have acted sooner.

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com