Why Brit 'Dragons' refuse to get burned by football

Does it matter? A mixed verdict is inevitable on that question. The injection of foreign cash has undoubtedly made the Premiership more competitive.

Roman Abramovich's money permits Chelsea, even without 11 important players, to still field a team full of internationals at Wigan last weekend.

And Thaksin Shinawatra's cash, plus a touch of class from Sven-Goran Eriksson, has turned Manchester City from a laughing stock to Champions League contenders. And the much reviled Glazers don't seem to have made much of a fist of wrecking Manchester United have they? When, in Derby chairman Adam Pearson's clever phrase, new owners insert "a cash injection, not a debt injection", a club can make great strides forward.

And the odd men out, Liverpool's Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who on Monday confirmed Liverpool are to be saddled with £30million per annum in extra interest payments as a result of their recent refinancing, won't be an embarrassment for long. Behind the bluster, they already appear to be planning their exit.

But there is a downside to the foreign owners' improvements, and that's the nature of these owners themselves.

Some are straightforward businessmen.

Others are ruthless operators who have made their money in ways that are, to put it mildly, controversial.

Men who can't be relied upon to have the firmest possible ethical base to their business operations. How far will that kind of behaviour become apparent in football? Clubs under foreign ownership lose Murray's The gulf war most, and sometimes all, their community links. As the late MP Tony Banks said of Roman Abramovich, these people buy a team, not a club, and there's precious little room for sentiment or the fostering of local links.

Each have their own personal reasons for coming here. These reasons will not be improving English football, though that may be an incidental by-product of their ego-driven investments.

But only if the Premier League and the FA are up to keeping an eye on them, and regulate them properly. And I doubt they will.

Which makes it all the more regrettable that British entrepreneurs, with the single erratic exception of Mike Ashley are not prepared to step up to the plate and invest big bucks.

In a previous generation, Jack Walker did at Blackburn, so did Sir John Hall at Newcastle. When even a publicity seeker like Sir Richard Branson resists the lure of football's brightly-lit stage, you know the reason is that successful British businessmen do not believe in the credibility of football as a business.

Since nature abhors a vacuum, British stand-offishness leads to foreign interventionism.

And we have to make the best of them, whilst remaining ever vigilant that the benefits of many more overpaid Carlos Kickaballs on the pitch will almost certainly have serious consequences elsewhere.