‘Third-party ownership” of players sounds a creepy and disturbing enough practice before any details are illuminated.

English football, along with that in France, Poland, and, perhaps surprisingly, Colombia, has been a TPO-free haven while investors have seeped endemically into player ownership elsewhere, particularly in Portugal and Spain. It is sad to see Portugal’s legendary clubs, Benfica, Sporting Lisbon and Porto, so hocking their players, yet finding TPO no real answer to financial struggle. Exporting dozens of players in the modern era has made the intermediary, the super agent Jorge Mendes, dazzlingly rich but the clubs are still frayed.

One expert has likened the practice to payday lending, in that it seems an easy solution when debts are pressing, but only creates what the CIES/CDES report for Fifa described as “a vicious cycle of debt and dependency”. Add the other findings, from an impressively thorough study which the Guardian has seen: players are often unaware their futures have been traded; sale to a fund almost determines a player will be sold rather than stay; coaches, sporting directors and club directors collude with the funds; agents are increasingly involved and so pulling more strings. With all this in mind, it is clear why Uefa is pledging to ban TPO in Europe if Sepp Blatter’s Fifa, as seems predictable, lacks the equipment to do so.

The practice has been banned in England since the furore over the arrival of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano at West Ham United in 2006, 100% “owned” by undeclared offshore interests fronted by the intermediary Kia Joorabchian. The Guardian revealed in 2011 that the Russian and Georgian oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Arkadi “Badri” Patarkatsishvili, both now dead, claimed ownership of the Argentinian footballers’ rights. In 2007 Harlem Springs, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands which sources said was owned by Joorabchian, bought Tevez for £24m, then loaned him to Manchester United.

Two years later, Manchester City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, paid £45m to Harlem Springs, according to sources close to the signing, and that purchase of an Argentinian striker by an Abu Dhabi sheikh from a BVI company was the one famously proclaimed by City on advertising billboards as Welcome to Manchester.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest What is third-party ownership? Owen Gibson explains all.

West Ham were fined £5.5m but not for the TPO interest in their players, as the practice was not yet banned. Their sanction was imposed by the Premier League for a failure to abide by every club’s duty to act in good faith towards each other, the league’s chief executive, Richard Scudamore, having said he was not given all relevant documentation.

The Premier League seems to survey all this from a moral high ground, yet its stance is seriously undermined by Chelsea’s apparent involvement in the third-party ownership fund Burnaby Investments, advised by Mendes and the club’s former chief executive Peter Kenyon, as revealed by the Guardian in January.

Scudamore has a mandate from the 20 clubs he represents to repeatedly emphasise his abhorrence of TPO and call for a worldwide ban, yet Chelsea have apparently invested in such a fund, which has bought players at Sporting Lisbon and no doubt other clubs too.

West Ham were sanctioned for not acting in good faith towards their fellow clubs, but since January, Chelsea have not commented, and there is no sign the Premier League disapproves of, or has investigated Chelsea’s involvement.

The league’s stance is no rules have been broken because Burnaby does not own stakes of players in England but Scudamore’s identified evils of third party ownership, which he argues threaten the game’s integrity, appear to be being practised by Roman Abramovich’s totemic Premier League club.

Scudamore’s league is doing its reputation no favours by staying silent and tolerant about Chelsea’s inexplicable apparent involvement in TPO, which the league, collectively, so condemns.