The first thing to say about Richard Scudamore, the chief executive of the Premier League, is that he is very, very good at his job. At a time when many observers were worried that the football bubble was about to burst, he managed to negotiate a £2bn deal for domestic TV rights, thus increasing his members' broadcasting revenues by 66%. If you are looking for someone capable - at a salary of £800,000 a year, plus bonuses - of leading your company through the treacherous waters of late capitalism, Scudamore might well be your man.
He does talk a lot of rubbish, though. He was all over the place at the weekend, telling the readers of the Daily Mail and the listeners to Five Live's Sportsweek why they need have no fears about football's brave new world. But to take him seriously as a PR man, you had to be seriously gullible.
Here, for instance, is what he said in attempting to allay fears, reawakened by the news that Kia Joorabchian and his mysterious backers may be about to buy West Ham United, that the new generation of club owners are in it for reasons other than the purely philanthropic. That, in fact, they might be in it to make a profit.
"I don't see that people are necessarily looking to take money out," Scudamore told the Mail. "This is where sanity has to be brought to the debate . . . I think people have always wanted football clubs for the same reason. It's not easy to come in and make money. Clearly, since 1888 it's moved on. It's no longer the draper, the candlestick maker or the butcher. But why did those local businesses want to own football clubs? Because it's a fantastic promotional opportunity - you become celebrated in your community. They are boys' toys, basically."
Then the level of sophistry ascended to the truly stratospheric. "There is no future pot of gold," he continued, "because, historically, football has always spent its income..."
No pot of gold? Tell that to Martin Edwards, who left Manchester United with a cheque for £93m in exchange for his shares, having also earned large sums in salary and dividends; or the Hall family and Freddy Shepherd, recipients of around £44m while retaining control of Newcastle United; or Sam Hammam, who sold Wimbledon for £36m, leaving them without a home ground; or Ron Noades, who trousered £25m of Mark Goldberg's money for Crystal Palace; or Ken Bates, who bought Chelsea for £1 in 1982 and sold it 21 years later for £17m.
I am indebted for those figures to my colleague David Conn, whose work in these pages week by week represents a standing affront to another of Scudamore's claims. "The game suffers from having football journalists who aren't versed in takeover and business law," he said, trying to persuade his audience that proper diligence is exercised when clubs change hands. True, not many of us are as comfortable with balance sheets as with team sheets. But you don't need to be John Maynard Keynes, or Conn, to recognise that a combination of enormous prosperity and traditionally lax controls has made the top level of English football a playground for wide boys.
Thanks to the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, no country in the world more closely resembles a gigantic car boot sale, open to all bidders. While the governments of the US, France and Germany make strenuous efforts to protect their assets, Britain has been happy, even eager, to yield water and electricity providers, railway operators, the British Airports Authority, Harrods, Jaguar, Rolls-Royce and many other institutions to foreign ownership - and on the face of it there is no reason why a football club should be different from Thames Water or Aston Martin. In the end, it's all business.
Scudamore knows the truth of that, but he also knows that his customers refuse to accept it. If football's financial dealings were truly transparent, the consequent mass revulsion would destroy the professional game. Hence his elaborate pretence.
