London, Aug 11 (DPA) Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Fulham, West Ham United, Manchester City, Portsmouth, Sunderland and about a quarter of Arsenal: heading into the new season almost half the teams in the Premier League are in foreign hands.

Should English football be worried? Has it, as Tom Bower, the author of 'Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football', put it, 'sold the crown jewels'?

Is wealth generated by English clubs being sucked away from English shores?

Given how often the question is asked, the answer is both surprising and surprisingly simple: no, it isn't, for the very simple fact that English football clubs tend not make a profit.

'At the moment, the Premier League is ahead of any other football league in the world, but its revenues still lag behind those of major US series such as the NFL or Major League Baseball,' said Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at the Cass Business School, part of London's City Univeristy.

'On the other hand, it's growing much faster and it has broader appeal.

'If it continues to grow in Asia, and especially in China, then it could become the biggest sporting series in the world.

'These investors think the globalisation of football will mean much bigger opportunities to make money.

'Also, several of them already run sporting franchises in the US, and they think they can draw on that experience to make Premier League clubs more profitable.'

But the Premier League is a different beast to the protected franchises of the US. Football has proved remarkably resistant to making a profit, and according to the most recent figures, Premier League clubs owe a total of 3.1 billion pounds ($5.2 billion).

The most recent figures available show that, of the sides in last season's Premier League, only Arsenal, Blackburn Rovers, Everton, Fulham, Tottenham Hotspur and West Bromwich Albion were profitable. Not a single one was not in debt.

This is the great trick that Premier League football has played: its sense of glamour and style has pulled in foreign investors who cannot conceive how profits cannot be made, and has taken their cash in investments that, in most cases, will never pay off.