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The bad news for English football is that the sheikhs mean business

The second wave of Premier League speculators make no attempt to hide their rampantly commercial agendas
George Gillett and Tom Hicks
George Gillet and Tom Hicks seemed to lack a genuine love of Liverpool. Photograph: PA

Stage two is upon us. As the first wave of Premier League speculators queue for a chopper out of Crashville, Manchester City, Liverpool and even Chelsea could be in Middle Eastern ownership by the time the most extreme experiment in laissez-faire economics sport has known finds its natural resting point.

That chug of whirring blades denotes a rooftop rescue for Tom Hicks and George Gillett, the incompatible Americans who persuaded the Royal Bank of Scotland to extend their £350m refinancing package until the summer. RBS, you're sure to know, is the bank we taxpayers now pretty much own, which means Liverpool could yet be nationalised before the Kuwaiti billionaire Nasser al-Kharafi agrees a price with the club's two profit‑hunting owners.

To the south, the good doctor who engineered the City takeover is sizing up a proposal to put to Chelsea and their absentee owner, Roman Abramovich. Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim caught the bug with Abu Dhabi's riposte to Dubai, where racetracks, indoor ski centres and seven-star hotels planted the Maktoum empire on the international entertainment map.

Here I would like you to commit to memory a statement made to (the new go-to site for Premier League fans) by Holger Haims, who runs the Swiss‑based Falcon Equity, the firm who would assemble the cash to tempt Abramovich.

"It's not about trying to buy a football club but a business," Haims said. "You don't make money because 11 guys run around the pitch. You make money because of all the other commercial aspects that go with the football club, particularly real estate and television rights."

It makes you nostalgic for the time when these guys hid such rampantly commercial agendas from public view. These days they don't even bother trying to persuade us that the sheikh or the oligarch first saw the team play when he was five hours old and has been nurturing the dream of owning it ever since.

"Chelsea till I die" is not a chant often heard in the desert palaces from which the Premier League's latest rescue party promises to ride. Here it should be said that Abramovich's entourage insist the Blues are not for sale. But supposing an Arab speculator offers him a skyscraper of petrodollars and a way out of having to take calls about Didier Drogba while his new girlfriend is trying to talk to him about art?

The global financial system has melted along with Iceland, and soon we will observe the fallout for the leveraged buyout artists (principally Hicks and Gillett) and the over‑spenders, not forgetting Newcastle, Portsmouth and West Ham. The picture is re-forming so fast that no forecast is safe beyond the obvious reality that there will be no third wave of buyout kings after the one now curling towards our shores. Once the asking price for Liverpool reaches £600m in the midst of a global crash, you pretty much know the balloon has hit the ceiling. Once Abramovich gets his 600-mil back you can be sure we've reached the end of the line for the blind-market grab.

While this latest caper was gathering pace, it was oddly reassuring to see Aston Villa agree a £3.5m transfer fee for Emile Heskey. An England centre-forward would be moving to a predominantly English club. This could be the best‑value deal since Dutch settlers paid the local tribes $500 for Manhattan.

The charms of the Italian and Spanish ownership models, so long derided by the Masters of the Universe who unleashed our Premier League TV rights boom, might come back into vogue if supporters hear too many more nakedly avaricious statements of the sort emanating from Falcon Equity.

To challenge English football's anything-goes Harvard Business School ethos was to invite a clobbering as a caveman or even a xenophobe. The problem was always that clubs were being picked off the menu of international investment (or make that borrowing) opportunities by gamblers for reasons that have nothing to do with football, sport or community.

Today's Liverpool v Everton FA Cup fourth-round tie will display the deeper meanings of the game in areas such as Merseyside. One day Hicks and Gillett will evaporate from this scene, and the Kop will remember them mumbling "You'll Never Walk Alone" while new scarves hung limply from their necks.

The reassuring truth fans can cling to is that only the bricks and mortar can be traded, never a strong identity. "Eleven guys run around the pitch." He made it sound as if that's the least of football's functions.

Stevens is rugby's latest ruck rock star

Substance abuse in the front row of an England rugby scrum seldom used to stray beyond Old Speckled Hen or a dangerous excess of chilli sauce on a midnight kebab.

Props and hookers, generally acknowledged to be members of a different species, or even citizens of other planets, busied themselves with pushing, not pushers. England's rugby lot, though, have mutated into a faintly decadent rock band, racking up drug habits (Matt Stevens), three-year drink-driving convictions (Mike Tindall) and the best seats at Milan catwalks (Danny Cipriani).

On the New Zealand tour last summer some players decided a 37-20 defeat to the All Blacks was the right excuse for a good night on the tiles. In his 7,000-word report, Judge Jeff Blackett found no evidence to support a local woman's claim to Auckland police that she had been raped (no formal complaint was ever filed) but fined Mike Brown and Topsy Ojo for their parts in the bacchanalia.

Stevens, the 26-year-old Bath and England prop who tested positive for cocaine after a Heineken Cup match last month, is now likely to be hit with a full two-year ban, despite the RFU's wish that the system should differentiate between performance-enhancing chemicals and social drugs.

Five reasons why Ricky Hatton was right to demand a 50-50 split with Manny Pacquiao

1. "Get your Bic out" was Hatton's instruction to the world lightweight champion on Friday. "In Manchester a Bic is what we call a pen," he explained. In one sentence the Hitman showed how comedy helps sell fights.

2. Pacquiao is a stellar fighter who beat a man claiming to be Oscar De La Hoya in huge pay-per-view event last time, but around the globe the world pound-for-pound No1 lacks the box-office clout that title carried in boxing's golden age.

3. The Las Vegas casinos love Hatton and his vast retinue of happy low-rollers, except when they jeer the US national anthem, as they did before he lost to Floyd Mayweather.

4. Hatton earned the right to demand half the purse by taking on Mayweather, Juan Urango, Paulie Malignaggi and Jose Luis Castillo in Sin City. An intrepid approach to travel deserves its reward.

5. Boxing needs its mega-matches, especially in the States, where cage fighting has made such inroads. This is the hottest date in town for Pacquiao, until Mayweather torches his fortune and laces gloves again.

Sports Personality of the week

Kaká's father, Bosco Leite, for his stand against the Nike corporate-speak of Manchester City's Garry Cook, who talked of "global franchise entities" when the Brazilian player's dad just wanted to know how much would be in his son's brown envelope every Friday.

Bosco's exasperation forced City to see that a) Europe's big clubs will try to fleece them for the biggest names and b) they need to build a top-six side of slightly more modest talents before a Kaká is willing to exchange Champions League action for a relegation fight and his own branded energy drink.

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