In China they’re about to launch a new way of selling luxury cars. Tall, glass-sided buildings resembling giant vending machines will contain Ferraris, Bentleys and other exotic machines, instantly available to anyone with a suitable credit limit. You pop your card in the slot, tap in your pin, and the car of your dreams will be delivered within moments, ready to drive away. Acquiring a new Lamborghini, they claim, will become as easy as buying a bottle of water.

The potential application of this to England’s Premier League is obvious. If the recent stories of an unnamed Chinese billionaire making the Glazers an unrefusable offer turn out to be true, it’s not hard to imagine a similar facility outside the gates of Manchester United’s training ground. What could be more convenient for young men on £300,000 a week with an unquenchable thirst for high-end consumer products?

Nothing could signal more clearly that the Chinese “get” football at the highest level. Never mind the fact that, from an international perspective, they have no players or coaches to speak of and that their chance of qualifying for a World Cup in the next couple of decades will rest on a successful bid to host the tournament. The People’s Republic understands the language of money, and has a very great deal of it to spend, which is what counts.

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China is already behind the strangest phenomenon seen in English football in the modern era: the ownership of the four major clubs in the West Midlands, by Paul Suen Ho Chung of Trillion Trophy Asia (Birmingham City), Tony Xia of the Recon Group (Aston Villa), the entrepreneur Guochuan Lai (West Brom), and Jeff Shi of Fosun International (Wolves). Did they get together and plan an invasion strategy, or did they come to the same conclusion independently?

Only one of those four clubs is currently in the Premier League. The others are in the Championship, playing in front of three sets of fans convinced that their rightful place is in the top tier. Three games into the new season, one of them is in second place, another is bang in the middle of the table, and the third is second-bottom. By next May, their supporters might be expressing very different views on the effects of foreign investment.

When the Premier League made its appearance 25 years ago this month, every one of its 22 constituent clubs was entirely owned by English interests. Some of those owners had deep historic roots, like the respective branches of the Moores family deploying the Littlewoods pools fortune at Liverpool and Everton, or the Bracewell-Smith and Hill-Wood clans at Arsenal. At Manchester United, Martin Edwards inherited control from his father, Louis, Matt Busby’s chairman. The Cobbold family, Suffolk brewers, were winding down a long and joyous stewardship of Ipswich Town.

Other prominent clubs were controlled by such distinctive characters as Alan Sugar at Spurs, Doug Ellis at Villa, Ken Bates at Chelsea and Peter Swales at Manchester City, none of them reluctant to court controversy. There were those who worked in different ways to secure success for their clubs, like the steel millionaire Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers, the property developer Ron Noades at Crystal Palace and the businessman Sam Hammam, who went to live in Wimbledon because he was a tennis fan but followed a different enthusiasm to preside over the Crazy Gang.

Some chairmen made less noise, like Leslie Silver, whose Leeds United had just won the last of the old First Division titles, Peter Robins at Coventry City and Richard Thompson at Queens Park Rangers. Other directors were still on the way up, like Steve Gibson, whose self-made fortune had already saved Middlesbrough and who would become chairman in 1994.

As the Premier League gathered momentum, some of these men took the opportunity to make an enormous amount of money. Bates, having bought Chelsea for a nominal fee of £1 in 1982, sold the club to Roman Abramovich for £140m in 2003. David Dein, Arsenal’s vice-chairman, bought 16.6% of the north London club for £292,000 in 1983 and sold a 14.6% chunk to Alisher Usmanov for £75m in 2007. Edwards made £120m from selling his United shares in tranches, including a 6.7% holding that went to the gold and copper mining magnate Harry Dobson, who neither visited Old Trafford nor attended business meetings before selling on to the Glazers for a £30m profit two years later. “Manchester United was not a football club,” Dobson told the Telegraph. “It was a business. There’s a huge difference.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Wolverhampton Wanderers chairman Jeff Shi has watched his side win their first three Championship games. Photograph: Sam Bagnall - AMA/Getty Images

So what does it represent to the Chinese, including Gao Jisheng, who paid £210m for an 80% stake in Southampton this week? No one really knows. When President Xi Jinping instructed his country’s ultra-rich businessmen to go out and buy foreign clubs two years ago, they took him seriously. But have they spent more than £2bn in order to acquire knowledge and expertise, or as part of a wider exercise in soft power? Or is it a purely entrepreneurial initiative by individuals hoping to increase the value of assets before selling them on at a profit, as others – such as the Liebherrs, who bought Southampton for £13m in 2009 – have already done?

But with only eight of the current 20 Premier League clubs in full English ownership – if we include Spurs’ Bahamas-based Joe Lewis and Everton’s Monaco-domiciled Farhad Moshiri – is the soul of English football under threat? For the fans, the arrival of a foreign investor inevitably triggers a wave of optimism; as long as the new money is well spent, most of them have no interest in who sits in the directors’ box. But no one can predict what will happen when this blizzard of foreign investment blows itself out as fashions and Britain’s economic position change in an increasingly volatile time.

On Friday the Chinese state council announced tough new restrictions on investment in things like overseas hotels and football clubs, so men like Gao and Wolves’ Shi might have only just made it in time. On Tuesday Shi’s new Portuguese coach watched two of his recently arrived compatriots score in Wolves’ 3-2 win at Hull City.

As long as the team look like getting promoted, the supporters won’t care whether Shi can find his way from Market Street to Molineux or develops a taste for a Black Country dish made from a pig’s innards. For them, in the end, league position is the only metric that counts.