Soccer - With the World in Financial Turmoil, How Safe is the English Premier League?

How rich are the benefactors buying into football at the moment? It is a question worth asking now that the supposed mega-wealth of Manchester City is threatening to turn the football world upside down.

Could it be possible that a club prepared to spend £108m on bringing Kake, arguably the world's most talented player, to north-west England and then paying him £500,000 a week to live there, could go bust.

Can a club that boasted only last week that it was looking to have two world class players for each position on the field, actually have an owner whose finances are freefalling to such an extent that he could pull the plug without any warning?

Are Man City bullet-proof?

Chelsea used to think they were, but they are now in danger of becoming the latest victims of the downturn after it was announced that their owner Roman Abramovich is putting the club up for sale.

Abramovich walking out suddenly puts the credit crisis into perspective for football.

The Russian tycoon was the original football moneybags. To date he has spent £600m in turning Chelsea from a team on the verge of administration into one of the biggest teams in Europe. But the downturn has cost Abramovich dear. Last year he lost at least an estimated £3bn of his £11bn fortune and with similar losses expected next year, there are rumours that he is suffering from a severe cashflow problem. His companies had to be bailed out with a £1.8bn loan from the Russian government recently.

With the world in financial turmoil, how safe is the Premier League?

Roman Abramovich is selling up at Chelsea because he can't afford to borrow another £1.8bn from the Russian government to keep him in Shevchenkos. West Ham owner Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson is facing the poor house, and even Man City's trillionaire sheikh is losing hundreds of millions of pounds a day. Is the super-rich Premiership really immune to the nightmare scenarios facing ordinary companies.

Abramovich wants £800m to walk away, and the only interested parties at that price are the oil-rich Gulf Arabs. Man City have one of the richest in Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi, but there seem to be plenty more where that came from if the five or six interested parties for Chelsea are any indicator.

But, and it is a huge but, are the Gulf Arabs as rich as they say they are, and is there wealth built on more solid ground than the sandy desert they inhabit?

There is no easy answer to that, but there are major concerns that the wealth of Man City's Sheikh Mansour and his compatriots is not as bottomless as it once seemed.

When the sheikh cemented his interest in Man City in August last year, newspapers breathlessly reported that his wealth rose $500m with ever $1 the price of oil rose. Back in the heady days of August last year, when the credit crunch was just an interesting new term for financial shenanigans, the oil price was as high as $146 a barrel.

Now with the oil price just under $38 a barrel, his losses since August equate to $5.4bn. And that is just on one investment avenue - albeit a vital one for the rich sheikh. Oil constitutes 56 per cent of Abu Dhabi's economy.

Last Friday was a particularly black day for the sheikh financially. His controversial investment into Barclays Bank last October was hit as the bank's shares plummeted 25 per cent on the London Stock Exchange. It cost the rich Abu Dhabi prince a cool £440 million in one day's trading. Experts say it won't be the last of the crisis for the UK-listed bank either.

Perhaps more interesting is the fall in the value of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority - the private well of money that was set up by Sheik Mansour's father, the Sultan, in the 70s to channel the family's wealth -sorry, the country's wealth - into profitable ventures. In the last six months the fund has been crucified by the credit crunch. Although there are no official figures because the private company does not have to publish its accounts, experts say that the biggest wealth fund in the world has lost a third of its value from the $453bn it managed last year to the $328bn it manages now. Another big blow to the Abu Dhabi coffers.

Additionally, as chairman of First Gulf Bank, Sheikh Mansour has had to trim scores of jobs off the bank's payroll as it suffered in the markets. Last weekend it was downgraded by credit agencies, a sure indicator of financial turmoil. The bank's reliance on foreign markets, particularly US bond markets means that it has not been able to escape the global slowdown and could suffer further drops from a double whammy of plunging oil prices and pressure on real estate markets - a staple in the Gulf.

And Abu Dhabi is one of the better-off Gulf states: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain are all much worse off.

Sheikh Mansour and Roman Abramovich are not the only members of football's moneyed elite to suffer recently. Indeed, football's rich list is littered with casualties that suggest football is one more downturn away from financial oblivion.

Tottenham's effective owner Joe Lewis lost a cool £500m of a £1.5bn fortune (a third, goddamit!) when Bear Stearns collapsed. Championship club QPR's part-owner Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate, has also taken a pounding. Reportedly the world's richest man, he has seen his wealth drop from a reported £27.7bn last year to a meagre £11bn.

The most high-profile loss is that of Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, the Icelandic owner of West Ham United, whose holding company Hansa has been threatened with insolvency. It was the collapse of Icelandic bank Landsbanki that did for Gudmundsson. As well as bankrupting an entire nation, the fall of Landsbanki has left Gudmondsson needing to sell West Ham at a cut price by March if he is not to be ruined.

Others will no doubt follow.

To put this all into perspective, however, there is still plenty of money in the Gulf States, Russia, and the US - certainly more than enough to prop up a few ailing Premiership clubs.

But the downturn has swept away prospective football speculators and put off many others from acquiring a new rich plaything. Just ask the owners of Ferretti, the world second-largest yacht maker, who last week had to call in debt advisers because sales of yachts have plummeted so drastically since August - when Sheikh Mansour bought Man City - that they are no longer viable. The extent of their demise has been so rapid that next week they are expected to announce profits for the year to August 2008 of EUR184m. And yet they could probably be out of business by the time August 2009 comes around.

It's a very sobering thought.

Which makes you think: if the super-rich are not buying yachts anymore - as staple to the super-rich as a TV is to a working man - what on Earth will tempt them to buy a football club: which are often laced in debt; invariably riddled with pampered overpaid stars; and always pilloried by thousands upon thousands of supporters who act like they own the club.

If I was an Arab billionaire, I'd be more tempted to opt for a traditional plaything and throw money at the search for the next Kentucky Derby winner. At least horses don't answer back when you feed them.

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