FX.co ★ Football tycoons: who does not play by the rules?

Wang Jianlin, the richest man in China, spent 40 million euros to buy 20% of the Atletico Madrid Spanish champion-club. Wang will join the board of directors and invest another 45 million euros that should help Atletico repeat the success of last season when they won the championship of Spain for the first time in 18 years.

Malaysian businessman Vincent Tan is the most odious football tycoon in the world. In 2010 he bought the Cardiff City Welsh club ("Azure Birds"), and immediately changed the club's color to red which caused a serious outrage of the fans. After the club won and entered the Premier League, Tan dismissed the director of the recruiting department and replaced him with a 23-year trainee.

Tony Fernandez from Malaysia bought Queens Park Rangers, a football club based in West London, in 2011, and since then the team has acquired 46 players. One time the amount of agency fees that he paid was the largest in the Premier League, but this did not stop the club from leaving it. Later QPR returned to the Premier League but its position in the table is the second from the end.

Indonesian businessman Erick Thohir bought the Inter Milan Italian football club back in 2013 but did not make much effort to improve the team that had won the Champions League Cup in 2010. The club showed good results in terms of accounting, but this did not lead to great success on the field.

Owners of the Venky's Indian poultry company, Anuradha Desai, Venkatesh Rao and Balaji Rao, bought the Blackburn Rovers club in 2010, and since then it has shown bad results. In 2012, the team left the league. The debts of the club are more than 45 million dollars.

The Hong Kong businessman, Carson Jung, acquired the Birmingham City club in 2009, and in the same year, the team left the Premier League. Jung resigned as president of Birmingham City in February 2014, but he remains the majority shareholder of the club. The parent company of the club is under investigation: financial regulators and the English football league accuse it of financial fraud.

The Arab owners of football teams are doing much better. In 2008, a member of the royal family of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, bought Manchester City for $330 million, and then spent about $1 billion to get the best talents in the world. The club won the English Premier League twice for three years and also collected several other trophies.