Premier League football in England has long been the target of rich foreign investors.
The revolutions at places such as Chelsea and Manchester City have been funded by overseas money, and famous clubs such as Manchester United and Liverpool have proved to be attractive investments for global businessmen.
The impact of the vast sums of cash sloshing around the game is regularly debated.
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Wage inflation, massive transfer fees and Uefa’s Financial Fair Play rules are just some of the outcomes of this recent trend within the game.
Whatever your view is about the morals of all this money being poured into the top flight, there’s no denying that the quality of football has improved markedly since the Premiership came into being in 1992.
Whether or not it’s worth the price that’s been paid is a matter for debate; but the fact that the quality of the sport itself has improved seems to be universally accepted.
However, it has come with a loss of patience, with rich owners becoming increasingly unprepared to allow their clubs to develop and mature over time.
Chelsea is perhaps the best example of this – Roman Abramovich is on his 10th manager in his decade at the club.
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Despite the fact that Chelsea were not up to much until less than two decades ago, anything other than trophies will not be tolerated now by Abramovich.
A similar thing is happening at Manchester City.
Roberto Mancini might have guided the club to the league title for the first time in more than 40 years, but finishing second the following season was deemed to be a failure. Mancini was immediately booted out.
Some might say that it’s a curious business plan to keep sacking your manager every time someone else wins the league.
After all, there can be only one winner each year, but more and more clubs now seem to think that changing the boss will secure glory for them.
It would be interesting to take today’s billionaire owners and put them in a time machine, allowing them to own a mini-league consisting of Shankly’s Liverpool, Ferguson’s Manchester United, Clough’s Nottingham Forest and Wenger’s Arsenal teams at the peak of their success.
Only one of them would come top at the end of the season, so would the other three managers be sacked? It might sound ludicrous, but that’s where we are today.
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Things are taking a more sinister turn at clubs lower down the Premier League ladder. Teams that are relative newcomers to the top flight are being funded by mega-rich businessmen who then act as though they have bought their own Chelsea or Manchester City.
The goings-on at Cardiff City in recent days have been just the most obvious example.
Vincent Tan is a wealthy Malaysian businessman who has chucked lots of money into the club. As a result, he clearly thinks he can do with Cardiff what he wants – and he seems genuinely surprised when not everything he does is welcomed with open arms.
His public spat with manager Malky Mackay saw the fans firmly take the side of the beleaguered boss, who apparently wasn’t good enough for Tan even though he was the man who took the Bluebirds up to the Premier League for the first time.
Initially, Tan was tolerated for longer than other owners would have been, simply because of the huge investment he put into the club.
Cardiff were the nearly men of the Championship, regularly finding themselves near the top of the table but never quite managing to make the final step.
That disappointment was compounded when rivals Swansea first made it into the Premier League and then stayed up comfortably, earning plaudits for their style of football.
Under Tan’s ownership, Cardiff have achieved their dream.
The fans were so pleased with the progress that had been made that the owner was able to change the club’s colours from blue to red (for marketing reasons).
There was pushback against that move, but the change went through because enough people were prepared to tolerate it in return for the success Tan’s investment had brought.
But patience has now run out with the Malaysian businessman, thanks to his bizarre treatment of manager Mackay.
It is not just in south Wales, either – the world of football has been united in condemning Tan’s recent behaviour, but he seems completely oblivious to the controversy he has caused.
It looks as though there is an equally big ego in charge at Hull City, although at least the problem there does not seem to involve a fall-out between owner and manager.
The problem at the KC Stadium stems from owner Assem Allam criticising fans who have protested about a name change to “Hull Tigers”.
Supporters who sang the song “City till we die” in protest against the change were branded “hooligans” by Allam, who said that as far as he was concerned, those fans could “die as soon as they want”.
In a newspaper interview, he said: “How can they call themselves fans, these hooligans, this militant minority, when they disturb and distract the players while taking away the rights of others to watch the football, and of companies who have paid good money for advertising?”
Even if his crass comments were simply made in the heat of the moment, that sort of attitude towards fans who have supported their team for many years before they arrived in the promised land is not one that will make friends or influence people.
And while the controversy at Hull is of the off-the-field variety at the moment, it doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to envisage someone such as Allam one day being as unreasonable with his managers as Tan is being at Cardiff.
It’s all a result of the huge financial stakes in the modern game. These rich investors pump their money into clubs (and are often welcomed for doing so) but then think they have a plaything that they can do with what they want.
Sometimes that means sacking a manager who has managed to hit the heights only of second place. Sometimes it means expecting a club with absolutely no Premier League pedigree to set the world alight immediately after promotion.
And sometimes it means introducing marketing plans that tear up a club’s long history.
Things are unlikely to change – not unless football fans want to see all this money pulled out of their clubs.
But these foreign owners need to understand that having deep pockets doesn’t mean they can ride roughshod over supporters without getting any comeback.
Unless they accept that, these investors need to be braced for a rocky ride.