Is the new Soccernomics turning the English Premier League into the world's most international game or a legitimizing front for notorious world oligarchs?

Yesterday Tom Hicks and George Gillette, the American co-owners of the Liverpool Football Club, turned down an offer from the Dubai-based investment group DIC that would have paid them £200 million each for their respective stakes in England's most historic sporting franchise. The decision to turn down what would have amounted to a £25 million return on a 13-month investment has been criticized by fans and financiers alike and left many wondering why Bush crony and Texas Ranger owner Hicks-who apparently refused the sale on his own-is so intent on keeping his place as one of the EPL's most high-profile foreign owners, considering the company he stands to keep.

Just last week deposed Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra returned to his home country to face corruption charges that could land him 13 years in prison, but the eyes of Manchester, England, and, arguably, the world were more focused on whether or not he would regain access to the £800 million fortune that could make Manchester City, the team he purchased in the summer of 2007, one of the richest clubs in Europe.

A royalist military junta deposed Thaksin in a bloodless coup in 2007 , accusing him of massive corruption and freezing over $1.6 billion in assets that he allegedly stole from the Thai people. Meanwhile, Amnesty International has said that Thaksin, while in power, presided over "very serious human rights violations." Thaksin fled Thailand for England where he subsequently paid £89 million Manchester City, a debt-riddled soccer team with a rich history, which for the last twenty years has played second fiddle to cross-town rivals, world super power Manchester United.

Thaksin infused the club-one of the lowest-spending in the EPL-with his own money. After hiring the former England manager, dour Swede Sven-Goran Erikkson, the club went on an unprecedented buying spree, spending over £30 million on new talent. When the Sky Blues started the season undefeated, people wondered for the first time in decades which Manchester team would finish higher on the league table.

Thaksin is not the only foreigner with a checkered past buying up the crown jewels of English football. The A-list includes: Mohammed Al Fayed, Roman Abramovich, Alisher Usmanov, and Lakshmi Mittal.

The Cast

Mohammed Al-Fayed

Remember way back in 1997 when Becks was just a soccer player who garnered above average jersey sales for his club? That was the year Princess Diana died in a car wreck in Paris. It was also the year that foreign ownership first came to English football when Mohammed Al-Fayed, Dodi's father, purchased Fulham FC, a second division club in West London.

The Egyptian Al-Fayed-who added the "al" to his name upon arrival in England only to be deemed the "false Pharaoh" by Private Eye-rose to financial prominence during the 1980s in the shadow of his brother-in-law, the famously shady international businessman and arms dealer Adnon Khashoggi.

In 1985 Al-Fayed bought the quintessentially English brand Harrods Ltd. for £615 million, but in spite of his best efforts, he was never able to gain English citizenship as both Labour and Conservative Home Secretaries repeatedly rejected his applications on grounds that he was not of good character. While the Home Office may not have accepted Al-Fayed, he managed to embed himself in English culture with his purchases.

In 2001 Fulham were promoted to the Premier Division and Fayed optimistically stated that he wanted the club to be "the Manchester United of the South." Al-Fayed's plans for Fulham to become the next Man U may not have worked out, but his purchase of the club set the stage for the higher-profile foreign takeovers that followed.

Roman Abramovich

In 2003 Russian oil magnate Roman Abramovich-at the time the richest man in England at an estimated value of over £10 billion-purchased Chelsea FC for £150 million. He then proceeded to spend a record transfer fee of nearly £90 million for European Footballer of the Year Andriy Shevchenko. Investigated by the Swiss for his role in a fraud case involving a $4.8 billion loan from the IMF to Russia, Abramovich avoided accusation when investigators abandoned the case because the USA and Russia refused to divulge information crucial to its development. He has served as a member of the Duma during the Putin regime and owes his fortune primarily to his 1995 takeover of the Russian oil company Sibneft.

Alisher Usmanov

Arsenal's single biggest shareholder, the Uzbek tycoon Alisher Usmanov served a six-year prison sentence for various crimes in the USSR but was later pardoned after Mikhail Gorbachev became President. Usmanov is the majority shareholder of Metalloinvest, a Russian industrial conglomerate. He claims to have been "a political prisoner" in the USSR, but speculation remains about the manner in which he accrued his fortune in lumber, mining, and investments. When confronted with allegations about his past, Usmanov has pursued defamation proceedings so aggressively that there is a marked absence of information concerning his past available on the web.

Lakshmi Mittal

Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian born self-made steel billionaire who is currently England's richest man and the world's fifth richest, bought Queens Park Rangers in December 2007. In 2002 Mittal was implicated for his role in a cash-for-influence scandal in which Tony Blair wrote a letter to the Romanian government to help Arcelor-Mittal win its bid for Romania's state steel industry. His family owns 44% of Arcelor-Mittal, the world's largest steel conglomerate. He famously spent over $60 million on his daughter's wedding.

Malcolm Glazer

In 2005 American businessman Malcolm Glazer purchased a controlling interest in Manchester United in a takeover bid valuing around $1.4 billion. The Florida-based investor, who also owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers shares with Tom Hicks a link to the Bush family. He purchased the nearly-bankrupt Zapata, an oil and gas company founded by George H.W. Bush and successfully diversified the brand into fish protein and Caribbean supermarkets.

The Global Game

While these owners are among the richest and most notorious of the foreign owners, they are representative of a new internationalism in English football on the field and in the clubhouse. A total of nine EPL clubs are now foreign-owned and three of the Big Four clubs-Chelsea, Manchester United, and Liverpool-are now foreign-owned.

How did English football, arguably the country's most distinctive nationalistic symbol, become so international?

The trend could be blamed on Manchester United's successful efforts in the late 90s to market their merchandise brand to the world through the avatar of their boy-hero David Beckham.

In 1985 an English club could only field three foreign-born players at once, but in 1995 Europe's highest court struck down the chauvinistic and protectionist policies that limited the number of foreign players on the field. The result was that as foreign players came to England, they brought their fans with them. By 1997 Manchester United jerseys with Beckham's #7 were appearing all over the world.

While in 1992 only 11 players from outside the UK and Ireland started Premier League opening matches, at the end of last season 340 foreign players graced EPL rosters. These days an English team could be, technically, totally French, Nigerian, or Brazilian.

The globalization of English football has paid dividends by way of TV rights and jersey sales, particularly in the rapidly expanding Asian marketplace. But even in Chicago, where I live, a day doesn't pass that I don't see some type of apparel representing one of the Big Four clubs-as Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea are commonly called.

The EPL's international marketing strategy has created a massive shift in soccernomics. Sky Sports and Setanta recently paid a combined £1.7 billion for the rights to show the EPL on TV for the next three years, and the EPL is now the fourth most expensive professional sporting league in the world behind America's big three: NFL, MLB, and NBA.

Initially the foreign influence in English football was welcomed for the financial infusion that helped to catapult the EPL past Italy and Spain's top divisions into place as the most watched sporting league in the world. Unlike the U.S. where free agency is the driving force and salary caps are the norm, European football leagues do not limit how much a club can spend on its players. The more you spend, the better your team. The pay structure of soccernomics has created an arms race in England that is attracting massive fortunes born of the ill-gotten global gains of the 90s and 00s.

The Verdict

Which brings us back to Hicks and his partner George Gillette, who bought Liverpool last year promising to respect the club's traditions and restore it to glory. This season has been a massive disappointment for Liverpool and fans have turned the blame onto the new American owners.

The Kop, Liverpool's bank of fanatic supporters, hold up signs reading "Yanks Go Home" and last week Hicks' son was allegedly showered with spit and lager when he tried to approach fans at a pub near Anfield, the ground where Liverpool plays. In a more whimsical protest of the American owners executed by the Liverpool supporter group Sons of Shankly, fans kidnapped star midfielder Jamie Carragher's 30th birthday cake.

Phoenix Suns guard Steve Nash, a life-long Tottenham Hotspur fan who has been vocal about his intent to join that club's ownership at some point in the future, took care to distance himself from Hicks and Gillette saying, "it's not like I'm some Yank who wants to make a profit out of football. I just want to see Spurs succeed."

But if it was profit Hicks and Gillette were after, one could argue they would have taken their $25 million a piece and walked away. And there has been suggestion that Gillette was willing to do just that. So why wouldn't Hicks sell out at a moment when a building nationalist backlash to foreign ownership is more apparent everyday?

The English are pleased to be profitable but freaking out about losing the last vestiges of their regional identities. I mean what's a Geordie (Newcastle fan) if his club is owned by a Georgian... or an Uzbek for that matter? And what's English football if there's not a single English player on the field, as is often the case at Arsenal, courtesy of French manager Arsene Wenger?

Maybe Hicks realizes that the drama of the English Premier League is all about the legacy of globalization as it was fostered by Bush , Blair , and Putin over the past decade.

The teams on the field no longer line up in bright-colored battle array to fight for the pride of all the little working people who pack their stadiums and sing their songs; instead they fight for the fortunes of the shadowy tycoons who stalk the luxury boxes buying and selling their names.