There's no Turk-over bid

"These fellows photographed did not go to Harrods and the chairman did not meet with them. Out of courtesy he let his advisors meet them and would do the same for anyone serious about investing in the club.

"Any football club chairman would always look at potential investors. You would be crazy not to find out what they have got to say."

Fulham insiders say the Falyali consortium, based in northern Cyprus, are serious about buying into the club but are a long way off a deal.

Husni Falyali may have arrived in the country on a private jet and been chauffeured around in Bentley but his group are believed to have just £35m to spend, a tiny fraction of the price Fayed would want to get out.

The chairman has also been thoroughly unimpressed by the way they appear to have made their interest in the club public. How he views their apparently close links with Asil Nadir, the disgraced Polly Peck tycoon, is unclear.

Nadir's representative says he is not involved in the consortium but even if he was it might not be enough to put Fayed off if the price was right. It has been reported that the chairman has been interested in raising new investment in the club for some time. Sources say backers interested in buying him out completely have been scared off by the price.

Since buying Fulham in 1997 he has spent a great deal bringing in the likes of Edwin van der Sar and Andy Cole and there is no indication he has any chance of recouping it while he is still in charge.

Two years after Fayed told Fulham to lower their ambitions and become self-sufficient, the club's last set of accounts only showed a small bottom line profit despite the £12.8m sale of Louis Saha to Manchester United.

They still have debts of around £100m and most of it is owed to Fayed, who has found football far more expensive than he anticipated.

He is currently embroiled in a multi-million-pound fight with former manager Jean Tigana at the High Court and has pursued a series of costly and mostly unsuccessful legal actions in the name of the football club in the last two years.

Fayed appears to feel like he is surrounded by dubious football figures trying to fleece him.

For the last three years Fulham have been overshadowed by the prospect of becoming a club without a home.

Fayed took a £15m down payment on their historic Craven Cottage ground in September 2002 and scrapped plans for an ambitious redevelopment.

They ground-shared with QPR at Loftus Road for two years and lost fans before admitting defeat in their quest to find a site to build a new stadium-on last year. Exactly why Fayed needed to offer the club's biggest asset to bring in £15m in short-term finance is still unclear but it raised doubts about Fulham's stability.

The club are now back at the Cottage after paying back the down-payment plus about £5m in interest and a cheap redevelopment got the ground up to Premier League standards.

But future plans are hazy and it could take Turkish businessmen or other new investors to make it clear.