Richistani billions are killing English football

Accolades for Jose Mourinho's qualities as a manager poured into Radio 5 Live and TalkSport yesterday morning. "Two Premiership titles in three seasons," one caller enthused, "and every other bit of domestic silverware on offer to a top English club - fantastic!" But we should pause for a minute and remember the other half of the Chelsea equation: Roman Abramovich's billions.

Since the Russian oligarch picked up the club for £140 million in 2003, he has habitually sunk countless hundreds of millions into the team every season. Not only does the club continue to lose tens of millions every year (£80 million in the most recent report, published in February), it has outspent all its rivals on transfer fees and wages since its sale to Abramovich. This is, however, no mere romantic gesture on Abramovich's part - with Chelsea's success on the field, his original investment has grown to about £500 million.

The figures are astronomical, and I am continually amazed when my Chelsea-supporting friends wax lyrical about Mourinho's tactical brilliance. Frankly, with the kind of cash that Mourinho has had to draw on, what is so striking about his tenure has been his failure to win the Champions' League with Chelsea - not his cupboard full of English silverware.

Occasionally he was compelled to integrate players such as Andriy Shevchenko on his boss's whim. But despite his erratic performances, the Ukrainian striker is still considered one of the finest players in the world.

More important than Abramovich's impact on the soul of his ex-manager has been his impact on English football. A competition which used to be a fair fight between 20 clubs has been turned into an utterly tedious and even pointless ritual that pits a few global billionaires against one another.

With Alisher Usmanov setting his sights on Arsenal and rumours about Everton flying around, we should see more than half of the Premier League in oligarchs' hands by the end of the season. They tend to run their clubs like Abramovich: not so much a Soviet-style as one belonging to exceedingly rich people who expect total and instant obedience to their every passing whim.

The chances of a club winning the Premier League no longer depend on the level of its local support, or the effectiveness of its scouting operation, or indeed the imagination of its manager. It depends primarily on how much money its billionaire owner is prepared to sink into it.

Until the early Nineties, the First Division, predecessor to the Premiership, was always an open race, allowing smaller clubs such as Derby, Ipswich or Burnley to prosper and shine. Even my own team, Oxford United, now stewing in the non-league Conference, won the League Cup in 1986. But in 1992, the Premiership was launched with Sky Sports providing a huge injection of cash into the league in exchange for exclusive television rights.

With the steady globalisation of sport through satellite TV, the money generated by Sky subscriptions became subject to "trickle up": ever greater sums of money found their way to ever fewer big clubs. Sky and the Premiership showed tremendous business acumen, and the big clubs started building their global brands.

Football became glamorous for the first time among the rich, and the corporate world started paying big bucks to secure the best hospitality suites at the big grounds. Ordinary fans on mortal wages found that their season ticket was consuming an ever greater chunk of their salary.

At the turn of the Millennium, the Premiership was beginning to outstrip all other leagues in the world. It was rapidly becoming what it is today: the richest, most successful sporting franchise in history.

And then came the mega-rich. With the exception of Russia, the new breed of owners hail from countries not traditionally associated with soccer: the US, Thailand, Iran, Iceland and Israel. The Premier League is attractive for a number of reasons. Perhaps the least definable but most important is the phenomenon known as reputation-laundering. The owners of big football clubs are seen as colourful society figures who are a welcome addition on the English scene.

Among the more recent arrivals, we have a former prime minister indicted on corruption charges in his own country, and the son of a man sought by the French authorities on serious charges of arms-trafficking. We seem to be unconcerned about the origin of money as long as it is ploughed into our favourite entertainment.

Of course, the owners also benefit from non-domiciled tax status, so in personal terms, investment in a Premier League club is very efficient. Above all else, provided a potential owner has no criminal convictions, he or she should have no difficulty receiving the Premier League's stamp of approval as "fit and proper" to be in charge of a club.

This does not involve digging around to uncover in what way the owner may have come by his or her money in the first place. And Britain's libel laws do the rest.

In four short years, we have got used to a league where everyone agrees at the start of the season that only one of four clubs has a hope of winning it: Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool. And on the whole, billionaires are interested in buying established global brands so it's unlikely that once great clubs such as Blackpool or Sheffield Wednesday will ever resurrect their glorious past. The other clubs are there, increasingly, to make up the numbers.

Fans of the big clubs or those who might just attract a global sugar daddy are surprisingly reticent at speaking out against this distortion. I know several socialist Chelsea supporters who happily rant against hedge-fund managers but are surprisingly understanding of the wealth that Abramovich has accumulated.

Many fans have ceased concentrating on whether their club will uncover and nurture a Rooney or a Theo Walcott. They know that before such stars have appeared for their first team, one of the big four will have snapped them up by waving a huge wad of cash in the impressionable youngster's face.

Instead, Premier League fans dream that their club will be snapped up by another citizen of Richistan. Who cares who the next Chelsea manager is? The people's game in Britain has been transformed into a rich man's plaything. And for the rest of us, from the Championship to the Conference, that means the Premier League is becoming unreal, boring - and above all else, irrelevant.

Misha Glenny's latest book McMafia: Crime without Frontiers, is published next spring by Bodley Head.