Saudi tycoon who owned Portsmouth probably didn't exist

Ahmed al-Faraj, the "brother" of Portsmouth's nonexistent owner

The "fit and proper persons" test the Premier League uses to vet prospective club owners has always been — how to put this diplomatically — a terrible joke snarled into a broken microphone by a depressed comedian on a beached cruise ship in hell. Over the last decade, the league-owners' Christmas party has been a seedy hive of exiled diamond dealers, American parvenus, deposed prime ministers, hysterical would-be sheikhs, tyrannical actual shiekhs, failed Icelandic bankers, and Mike Ashley.

But at least those people were real! According to this month's Spectator Business magazine, that's a claim that can't be made about former Portsmouth owner Ali al-Faraj. Al-Faraj, who "bought" Portsmouth last October, but then somehow never made it to a game or spoke to anyone in the league, was apparently a mirage conjured up out of financial documents and an erotic juxtaposition of the words "Saudi" and "money." His company ("the chemical giant Sabic") was in fact owned by the government and no one there has ever heard of him. But folks in the town say that if you repeat his name beneath the old oak tree at midnight, you'll hear a lonely voice whispering "contract fraud."

The motives behind the apparent scam are murky, complex, and meticulously detailed on various conspiracy-minded Portsmouth fan forums. Suffice it to say that if you're not really interested in the financial implosion of the Gaydamak family, all you need to know is that the mysterious consortium that was then trying to buy Portsmouth was basically cool with staying as mysterious as possible, and maybe also with not spending their own real money on the club if a fictional character could buy it for them with his imaginary money. So they gave their group a fake leader. This all happened in the middle of the grim parade of disasters that nearly led to the demise of the club last month, which was always too crazy to be carried out entirely by real people anyway.

On the other hand, al-Faraj was arguably still better than Hicks and Gillett! (Yes, he consistently failed to pay the players, but he also loaded less debt onto the club.) Not only has the Premier League's stringent ownership policy failed to distinguish fake people from real people, it has created a climate in which fake people can sometimes do a better job running your soccer club than real people. This is what happens when your league prioritizes money to the point that it forgets about atoms. If Randy Lerner turns out to be Starbuck from Moby-Dick, don't be surprised.

Brian Phillips blogs about soccer at The Run of Play. You can follow him on Twitter.

Photo: Getty Images