The chief executive of the League Managers Association has warned that owners of a number of Premier League clubs are talking about trying to scrap promotion and relegation in order to safeguard their investments.
"There are a number of overseas-owned clubs already talking about bringing about the avoidance of promotion and relegation in the Premier League," said Richard Bevan. "If we have four or five more new owners, that could happen."
He said he understood that talks had taken place among "American owners and some of the Asian owners as well".
With Stan Kroenke's move to become the majority owner of Arsenal in the summer, the north London club joined Manchester United, Liverpool, Sunderland and Aston Villa in American hands.
"If you're looking at sport all around the world and you look at sport owners trying to work out how to invest and make money, you'll find that most of them like the idea of franchises and if you take, in particular, the Americans, there have without doubt been a number of them looking at possibly having more of a franchise situation," said Bevan, who had been speaking at the annual conference of the Professional Players Federation.
"That would mean no promotion and relegation. My point is not whether this is good or bad, although personally it would not be good news for English football. My point is to ensure that the FA [Football Association] is strong enough to ensure the principles on which our clubs are run."
Last week the managing director of Liverpool, Ian Ayre, said pressure would build for clubs to be able to sell their own overseas TV rights in order to be able to compete effectively with overseas rivals.
The new wave of US owners, who look on Premier League football as an investment rather than a vanity project, is expected to look overseas for new revenue streams, although other clubs quickly moved to distance themselves from Ayre's comments.
Bevan said the pressure from Premier League clubs meant it was important that government proposals to introduce an over-arching licensing system administered by the FA were introduced.
"If I was an American owner and owned a football club, or if I was an Indian owner, I might be thinking that I would like to get rid of promotion and relegation because my shares would go up," he said. "That's why the role the FA plays has to be a much stronger one that it has been in the past.
"The problem with the RFU [Rugby Football Union] and the ECB [England and Wales Cricket Board] and the FA is that they are institutionalised and institutions, when they're around successful world business people, often move a bit slower."
The board of Aston Villa, owned by the American Randy Lerner, said they were confused and surprised by Bevan's remarks about unnamed American and Asian owners. "If he intended this group to specifically include Aston Villa, as could be inferred by his comments, then we would ask him to confirm as much. We might also add that the founding of the Football League in 1888 was led by a previous chairman of Aston Villa, William McGregor." It is understood that Villa have not been involved in any discussions of the sort described by Bevan and have no intention of any such involvement.
Premier League insiders insisted there was little appetite for any move to end promotion and relegation. It has not been debated for two years, when Bolton Wanderers put forward a suggestion for a two-tier Premier League with limited promotion and relegation, which was roundly rejected.
Clubs bought into the traditional league structure for competition and commercial reasons, the insiders said, and pointed out that the FA did not necessarily require new powers to block any move to do away with it.
Even if 14 of the 20 clubs voted to abandon promotion and relegation, the FA could intervene and use its "golden share" to prevent it from going ahead.
Stoke City's chairman, Peter Coates, spoke out strongly on Monday against scrapping relegation and promotion. "I'd be horrified to think that was someone's long-term agenda," he told the Associated Press. "Although it happens in America with franchises, our traditions are totally different … it would be an absolutely unthinkable thing to happen if we wanted to try and close that particular [relegation] door. It would be so bad for the game and would do it immense damage.
"You'd take away the thing that's so important: the opportunity to go up and down which creates a mass amount of interest. There's as much interest in the relegation battle as the title battle."
