Magnates and football clubs have long been seducing each other with their mutual attractions of private cash and ego-boosting celebrity but now the added lure of TV's millions means soccer is catching the eyes of some of the world's biggest moguls.

The sight of a media owner in a football shirt was pioneered by Rupert Murdoch's one-time arch rival, the late Robert Maxwell, who sparked a change in the sport's rules by trying to take holdings in no less than four clubs.

Flamboyant Mirror Group owner Maxwell was barred from trying take over Watford in 1987 at a time when he already owned his long-term passion Oxford United along with Derby County and Reading FC.

A bitter legal battle with the Football League resulted in a new a set of rules being drawn up barring ownership of more than one club by any single individual.

But even with the limit of one club per tycoon, the decision by established millionaires to plough large sums of money into the coffers of their chosen clubs is often provoked by the peculiar sense of loyalty and nostalgia that the game inspires.

No other footballing love affair has been more enduring than that of Elton John and his beloved Watford FC. John bought the club back for £6 million last year, seven years after he sold it.

Steel tycoon Jack Walker is another example of the wallet-wielding messiah. He ploughed £54 million into Blackburn Rovers, propelling them to their first league championship in 81 years in 1995.

Around a dozen other business figures, including Newcastle owner Sir John Hall and Tottenham's Alan Sugar, are similar examples of the home-grown football benefactor.

But the genesis of soccer from a sport for millions into a game for making millions has brought men and companies of considerably greater financial clout into the game on an international basis.

Murdoch is in fact slightly behind the times with fellow media magnate and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi holding the reins of power at AC Milan for more than a decade. In France, television station Canal Plus owns the country's biggest side, Paris St Germain. Football offers an intoxicating mixture of spectacle and profitmaking opportunities which, it seems, the empires of entertainment run by Murdoch and his equivalents are intent on exploiting to the full.